Mona's face became very grave. "Yes," she said, "there is a great deal in that--though I believe, as some one says, that we studiously refrain from hurting people in the first instance, only to hurt them doubly and trebly when the time comes--there is a great deal in the puzzling subject of Compromise; but it has not come much into my life. There has been no one to care----" Suddenly she laughed again and changed the subject abruptly. "It is so odd," she said, "so natural, so like our humanity, that we should argue like this--you in favour of conscious influence, I against it--and I make not the smallest doubt that your life is incomparably simpler, franker, more straightforward than mine." "That I do not believe," he said emphatically. She looked at him with interest. "I suppose you really don't. I suppose you are quite unconscious of being a moral Antiseptic?" "A _what_?" he asked with pretended horror. "It doesn't sound very nice." "Doesn't it? I should think it must be rather nice to make the world sweeter, sounder, wholesomer, simply by being one's self." "Miss Maclean--you are very kind!" "I wish I could say the same of you! I call it most unkind to make that conventional remark in response to a simple and candid statement of a fact." "It was not conventional. I meant it. It is most kind of a man's friends to give expression now and then to the good things they think about him. One almost wonders why they do it so seldom. The world is ready enough to give him the other side of the question. The truth is--I was thinking how very difficult it would be to formulate a definition of you." Mona put her fingers in her ears with unaffected alarm. "Oh, please don't," she said. "That would be a mean revenge indeed. It is one thing to say frankly the thought that is in our mind, and quite another to go afield in search of our opinion of a friend. There is a crude brutality about the latter process." "True," he said. "And I did not mean to attempt it. In fact, I should not dream of pigeon-holing you." "You _are_ unkind to-day. Did I deny that you were fifty other things besides an Antiseptic? and may not an Antiseptic have fifty other chemical properties even more important than that one? Who talks of _pigeon-holing_?" "You must have the last word, I see." "Womanlike!" she said, pretending to sneer. "Womanlike!" he repeated mischievously. "And now, pray note that _I_ have presented you with the last word. Any woman could answer that taunt. Instead, I inquire what that shanty on the hill is?" "That shanty, as you are pleased to call it, is the hotel and restaurant of the place. Shall we have lunch now, or after we have been on the glacier?" "Oh, after! I cannot rest until I have felt the solid ice under my feet."