He told her she was very wrong. "That's giving me strength of character. I haven't any strength of character at all. That's been my failing all my life. I tell you what I've got instead. I've got the most frightfully, the most infernally vivid sense of what's right in my own personal conduct. Lots of people haven't. I envy them. They can do what they like. But I know what I ought to do. I know it so absolutely that there's no excuse for me when I don't do it, certainly no credit if I do. I go in with my eyes open or I stay out merely because my eyes are open. There's nothing in that. If it's anything it's contemptible." She said, "Teach me to be contemptible." V In those words he had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed--that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it--was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind circumstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his strength. He could "at least" (he used to think) prevent his limbs from taking him to her. But his mind--his mind turned to her; automatically, when he was off his guard, as a swing door ever to its frame; frantically, when he would abate it, as a prisoned animal against its bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked, using the expression and envisaging it. He used to think, "Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind. But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her." To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured words, as one pronouncing sentence, rectitude's austere asylum for their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle acquiescence,--these were most terrible to his governance upon himself. VI He said one day, "You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's terrific, Nona.