But Ideala was disturbed. "I can't read," she said. "Tell me what you thought of me when I came to you that first day? I fancied you were old. And I have been afraid since, in spite of your cousin's suggestion, that you may have considered it odd of me to introduce myself like that." "Oh, it is quite customary here," he answered. "But even if it had not been, we can't all be bound by the same common laws. The ordinary stars and planets have an ordinary course mapped out for them, and they daren't diverge an inch. But every now and then a comet comes and goes its own eccentric way, and all the lesser lights wonder and admire and let it go." "That would be very fine for us if only we were comets among the stars," she said. "Oh, you might condescend to claim a kindred with them," he answered lightly. "The only heavenly body I ever feel akin to is one of those meteors that flash and fall," she said. "They go their own way, too, do they not, and are lost?" "There is no question of being lost here," he interposed. "The most scrupulous have made an exception in favour of one person, and the world has not blamed them. After having endured so much you are entitled to some relaxation. I should do as I liked now, if I were you." She looked at him inquiringly. It seemed as if he were not expressing himself, but trying the effect of what he said upon her. He was sitting in his usual place now, drawing figures on the blotting- pad. "You have read, I suppose?" he added, after a pause, and without looking up. "I wish I had never read anything," she exclaimed passionately. "I wish I could neither read, write, nor think." But the trouble now was, if only she could have recognised it, that she did not think; she only felt. She got up and went to the mantelpiece; he remained where he was, sitting with his back to her. Presently she began to look at the china, absently at first, but afterwards with interest. There were some new specimens, just unpacked, and all crowded together. "What a lovely lotus-leaf," she said at last. "Satsuma, I suppose--no, Kioto; but what a good specimen. And it is broken, too. What a pity! I should so like to mend it." "Would you?" he said, rousing himself. "Then you shall." He went to one of the cabinets and got out the materials, and in a few minutes they were bending busily over the broken plaque, as interested and eager about it as if no subject of more vital importance had ever distracted them. They were like two children together, often as quarrelsome, always as inconsequent; happy hard at work, and equally happy idling; apt to torment each other at times about trifles, but always ready to forget and forgive, and with that habit in common of forgetting everything utterly but the occupation of the moment.