He spoke of her seldom and evasively. In the debate which he carried on with himself—only occasionally asking for an opinion from me—he generally indicated her under the description of “the other thing”—other (it was to be understood) from all that Nina represented. Taken like that, the description, if colorless, was at least comprehensive. And it did get Lucinda—bluntly, yet not altogether wrongly. He saw her as an ideal—the exact opposite of the ideal to which he had hitherto aspired, the ideal of regularity, wealth, eminence, reputation, power, thirty per cent., and so on (including, let us not forget, piety). So seen, she astonished him in herself, and astonished him more by the lure that she had for him. Only he distrusted the lure profoundly. In the end he could not understand it in himself. I do not blame him; I myself was considerably puzzled at finding it in him. To say that a man is in love is a summary, not an explanation. Jonathan Frost—old Lord Dundrannan—had been a romantic in his way; Nina too in hers, when she had sobbed in passion on the cliffs—or even now, when she cherished disturbing emotions about things and people whom she might, without loss of comfort or profit, have serenely disregarded. There was a thread of the romantic meandering through the more challenging patterns of the family fabric. Half a dozen times I was on the point of flying into a rage with him—when he talked easily of “buying Valdez,” when he assumed Lucinda’s assent to that not very pretty transaction, when he hinted at the luxury which would reward that assent, and so on. But the genuineness of his conflict, of his scruples on the one hand, of his passion on the other, made anger seem cruel, while the bluntness of his perception seemed to make it ridiculous. Perhaps on this latter point I exaggerated a little—asking from him an insight into the situation to which I was helped by a more intimate knowledge of the past and of the persons; but at all events he was, as I conceived, radically wrong in his estimate of the possibilities. At last I was impelled to tell him so. It was very late; in disregard of his “Don’t go yet, I haven’t finished,” I had actually put on my coat, and taken my hat and stick in my hand. I stood like that, opposite to where he sat, and expounded my views to him. I imagine that to a cool spectator I should have looked rather absurd, for by now I too was somehow wrought up and excited; he had got me back into my pre-Paris state of mind, the one in which I had been when I intimated to Nina that I must hunt the Riviera for Lucinda and find out the truth about her at all costs. The Conference on Tonnage was routed, driven pell-mell out of my thoughts.