Ruby was wandering about, rather bored, and Lychnis, as often before, talked intimately to her confessor. “I am so tired of reading books and meeting people and thinking, just to fill up the time. I am so tired of being conscious and trying to be more conscious. It is a disease that a drink of genuine life would purge out of the system. I want to become so that I’m waiting to get up in the morning just because it is another day to live; then, when I lie down in bed at night, sleep would be a deep physical pleasure. I wish it was a young world, with only a few people in it, and spring meant that one would go out of doors and ride away on some quest.” “Romantic,” he observed. “And is not that what you are to do now, with your squires?” “But it will be only us, and we only fill up the time, without zest and unconsciousness. Would you call my father whole-hearted any more? He knows now that he makes what is not worth making, and he has lost touch with life. Sir Richard lives merely intellectually, and he only knows about the how of things and argues fantastically as to their why. He makes out God to be a symbol in mathematics. Then Terence. His visions are old, and I think they are pathological and mad. His auras and reincarnations and glittering spirits from other planes, and all his vibrations and rhythms and things—they are the cloud-rack of a decaying personality. They are illusions of visions; and who would follow them to the world’s end, except daddy, more in contempt than faith? And as for Blackwood, he is so disillusioned that he wants to come to an end, and maltreats his mind with some old lost discipline for making it think of nothing, which it was never meant to do. And Sprot does not even know that there are thoughts, or doubts, or despairs. He’s merely a cell, and he can only market goods, I am sure without zest. No, Fulke is the only one who has any vision of a sweet and joyous world. He has youth in him, and desire, and all that. But his shape displeases me.” She looked up at the plum-blossom burning on the branches above her. “There is Quentin. He has zest,” Ambrose observed. “But what for? Yet he pleases me, and if I find nothing at the end of this journey I think I may let him please me more—if he can. For one can have pleasure if one can have nothing else. Yet there are certain things about love that I don’t thoroughly understand—you could tell me, if I could ask you. I think I could.” Her head was bent in thought. Then she raised up her passion-lidded eyes, and Ambrose took the opportunity to examine her state of mind. “Perhaps it is not life that you desire,” he said thoughtfully. “There is something else—you will understand what I mean some day.” “You mean love, I suppose?” she asked, indifferent. “No, not that.”