“I find love a bore,” she observed. “It might not be, I can conceive. Several have loved me, and Fulke now I’m afraid, and Quentin, if we are to call that love. And I love myself undoubtedly. When I see myself in the mirror I wish, sometimes, that I were a young man, and I feel that if I were women would love me, and I would take one—perhaps Ruby, though she is rather stupid. I could love a god, if he wasn’t too curly-headed and milk-white. Mine would be dark-haired, not fair, like Terence’s clumsy Irish heroes. But there are no gods, unless there are some lost here in China. Mine would have an air of profound thoughtfulness. If there were gods, do you think I would have a chance?” She looked so comically serious that Ambrose laughed at her. She was petulant at his laughing. “You don’t love me, do you, Ambrose? You only think I’m funny.” He says her sentence came at him like a flung blossom with a little dart in it. He records his answer: “I can make no talk when it comes to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Really, I’m not sure that I’m aware of feelings and desires and so forth.” He remarks that he scarcely knew how to put it. “Oh, I know,” she replied scornfully. “You only make notes. We are all specimens. Still, that’s just as well, because if you were at all likely to love me”—she flushed, now, at the word spoken before in a rushing impulse—“there’d be nobody left to talk to. You know, Ambrose....” She hesitated, looking about in the grass as if words might spring up there. “It seems funny to say ... I mean, all those men are a nuisance in one way or another. When they look at me their eyes are seeing me as a young woman. Daddy, even ... you understand? Fulke displeasingly, because he’s like a chimpanzee and I find it insulting, and Sprot sentimentally and disgustingly, and Quentin—rather excitingly. And Sir Richard, too, Ambrose, though it sounds wicked of me to say it, but I can’t help knowing. Terence, of course, pretends I’m his inspiration. Do poets embrace their inspirations? I expect so. And with Arthur Blackwood it’s the way he sternly doesn’t look at me, and when I’ve been talking to him he always goes into four or five kinds of trances. It’s all a nuisance. But you, when you look at me and talk to me, though I know you perceive every inch and movement of me and very many of my thoughts, but not all by any means, I don’t mind. It is so, isn’t it?” He bowed, and admired her standing up straight and frowning and flushed against the stem of the young plum-tree. A pink blossom fluttered down on her.