“She hid it well. And depend upon it, Herman, whatever sufferings a woman has in such a case, whatever struggles, they are _toward_ the thing she would do, not away from it.” I do not know how I knew this, but the moment I had spoken I was quite sure. “If she struggles,” I said, “it is to justify her right to do it, to quiet compunction, to appease her fears. Zirriloë came to the end too quickly to have suffered much.” We were both still after that, while the heavens whitened and showed me a little of how worn he was and what marks of the trail were on him. I suppose he must have felt the melting of my mood toward him, for presently his hand stole toward me and began to finger the loose end of my cougar skin. “You never seem to think, Mona”—he hesitated—“what this might mean to me.” “Well, what does it mean?” I tried, I think I tried, not to make my voice sound so yielding that he should suppose me softened toward the shame and wrong of it, nor so hard that he might imagine the hardness grew out of my caring what it meant to him. I must have fallen a little to one side or the other, for it was a long time before he began again. “I don’t know,” he said, “I am hardly sure myself. There was a time before we came to Outland—how long ago was that, Mona?—when I fell short of much that you said and thought. There was something in books and poetry and music, especially in music, that you were always expecting me to understand, and the expectation irritated me. I fell into the way of denying and despising that something, and trying—I am afraid succeeding, too, in making myself feel that it sprang from some superiority in me not to understand.... Are you listening, Mona?” “Yes, Herman.” “It was not that I felt the want of it so much in myself, but other people—you, Mona—missed it in me. There was a door to all that, about to swing upon the latch ... and I could never swing it. And then we came to this free life ... and Zirriloë.... Did you think I was in love with her, Mona?” “Were you in love with her?” “I don’t know ... she made the door swing back ... she had such a way of walking ... and that little smile of hers coming and going ... she was all those things made manifest. A man would understand. I liked to do things for her. It was a way of serving all the loveliness of women ... it was serving you, Mona....” “Ah,” I said, “I would have understood better if the service had been paid in person.” “I suppose so.” He was both humble and reluctant in his acknowledgment, and paused so long a time after it that I could mark the ebb of the dark from the highest hills and the full slopes emerging rounded with verdure. But I found I had nothing to say to him in all this, and perhaps he expected nothing.