The wood was a wild place on a slope of the bluff some distance above the house. Its underbrush made it unpopular with the guests of Peele Manor. Steele left the train at the regular station a mile up the road and walked back without encounter. In the heart of the dark cool little wood Patience swung two hammocks and filled them with pillows. Steele lay full length in his and looked comfortable and happy, a cigar ever between his lips. Patience, in hers, sat in as dignified an attitude as she could assume. “Does it make you feel romantic?” he said one day, looking at her quizzically. “What do you mean?” she asked, flushing a little. “Oh, I think you have a queer romantic sentimental streak through your modernity—or had. I’ve been wondering if there was any of it left.” “I never told you.” “No, but you suggest it. Tell me: didn’t you once have ideals and that sort of thing?” “I don’t see how you can even guess it, for I have none now.” “Oh, yes, you have. You won’t when you’re thirty, but you have all sorts of kiddish notions stored away yet in that brain of yours.” He had seen Peele a few days before in the train, and knew the history of their courtship quite as well as if she had related it to him, but he was curious to know what she had been before. He drew her on until she told him the story of the tower and the owl. That little picture pleased his artistic sense, but when she described her girlish ideals and dreams he threw back his head and laughed loud and long. “What would I have done with you if I had met you then?” he said, looking with intense amusement at her half angry face. “I should have run, I expect. You are a thousand times more interesting now.” “Not to myself.” “Of course not, because you are less of an egoist, and draw a larger measure of your individuality from your environment. But you are real now, where before you were unreal—you were a sort of waxwork with numerous dents. The two extremes in this world are nature and civilisation. Children belong by right to nature, and she holds on to them as long as possible. When civilisation gets hold of them she proceeds to pick out with a pair of tweezers all but the primal passions; and the result is the only human variety capable of enjoying life.” “Don’t you believe in ideals?” asked Patience, rather wistfully.