“You went away for a long while; but you remembered and you wrote. I’m not a letter-writer, and that was really the reason I didn’t answer. I have to be with people—to feel them—if I’m to talk with them to any purpose—to ask then questions and get answers, even though they don’t say anything.” (I saw her fingers bend in a light pressure on old Sir Paget’s knee.) “I should have sounded stupid in my letters. Or said too much! Because the only thing was to say nothing about it, wasn’t it? You knew that as well as I did, didn’t you? If once we had talked—in letters or when you came back——! I did nearly talk when you suddenly appeared there on the Piazza at Venice. It was pretty nearly as good as a declaration, wasn’t it, Julius?” She gave a low merry laugh; but then her eyes wandered from my face to the blaze of the fire, and took on their self-questioning look. “I think it’s rare to be able to see the humor of things all by yourself—I mean, of course, of close things, things very near to you, things that hurt, although they’re really funny. You want a sympathizer—somebody to laugh with. Oh, well, it goes deeper than that! You want to feel that there’s another world outside the miserable little one you’re living in—outside it, different from it—a place where you yourself can be different from the sort of creature which the life you’re leading forces you to be—at least, unless you’re a saint, I suppose; and I never was that! You want a City of Refuge for your heart, don’t you, Sir Paget? For your heart, and your feelings; yes, and your humor; for everything that you are or that you’ve got, and want to go on being or having. Because the worst thing that anybody or any state of things can do to you, or threaten you with, is the destruction of yourself—whether it’s done by assault or by starvation! In the world I lived in—the actual one as it had come to be for Arsenio and me—I was done for! There was hardly anything left of me!” She suddenly turned her face up to Sir Paget, with a murmur of laughter. “It was like the Cheshire cat! Nothing left but a grin and claws! A grin for his antics, claws to protect myself. That’s what I had come to in my own world—the little world of Arsenio and me! Claws and a grin—wasn’t I, Julius?” “I would not hear your enemy say so, but——” “You know it’s true; I knew at the time that you felt it, but I couldn’t alter myself. Well, I told you something about it at Venice—trying to change, not succeeding! Even his love for me had become one more offense in him—and that was bad. The only thing that carried me through was the other world you gave me—outside my own; where you were, where he wasn’t—though we looked at him from it, and had to!—where I could take refuge!”