When I tried to tell Ellador that women too felt so, with us, she drew away from me, and tried hard to grasp intellectually what she could in no way sympathize with. “You mean--that with you--love between man and woman expresses itself in that way--without regard to motherhood? To parentage, I mean,” she added carefully. “Yes, surely. It is love we think of--the deep sweet love between two. Of course we want children, and children come--but that is not what we think about.” “But--but--it seems so against nature!” she said. “None of the creatures we know do that. Do other animals--in your country?” “We are not animals!” I replied with some sharpness. “At least we are something more--something higher. This is a far nobler and more beautiful relation, as I have explained before. Your view seems to us rather--shall I say, practical? Prosaic? Merely a means to an end! With us--oh, my dear girl--cannot you see? Cannot you feel? It is the last, sweetest, highest consummation of mutual love.” She was impressed visibly. She trembled in my arms, as I held her close, kissing her hungrily. But there rose in her eyes that look I knew so well, that remote clear look as if she had gone far away even though I held her beautiful body so close, and was now on some snowy mountain regarding me from a distance. “I feel it quite clearly,” she said to me. “It gives me a deep sympathy with what you feel, no doubt more strongly still. But what I feel, even what you feel, dearest, does not convince me that it is right. Until I am sure of that, of course I cannot do as you wish.” Ellador, at times like this, always reminded me of Epictetus. “I will put you in prison!” said his master. “My body, you mean,” replied Epictetus calmly. “I will cut your head off,” said his master. “Have I said that my head could not be cut off?” A difficult person, Epictetus. What is this miracle by which a woman, even in your arms, may withdraw herself, utterly disappear till what you hold is as inaccessible as the face of a cliff? “Be patient with me, dear,” she urged sweetly. “I know it is hard for you. And I begin to see--a little--how Terry was so driven to crime.” “Oh, come, that’s a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima was his wife, you know,” I urged, feeling at the moment a sudden burst of sympathy for poor Terry. For a man of his temperament--and habits--it must have been an unbearable situation. But Ellador, for all her wide intellectual grasp, and the broad sympathy in which their religion trained them, could not make allowance for such--to her--sacrilegious brutality.