‘But everything depends on feeling,’ he said softly, but lightly, as though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague depths it had emerged from; ‘and if one has forgotten how to feel--if when one sees or bears something beautiful that used to stir one, one can only say “I remember it moved me once!”--if feeling dies, like life, like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man?’ She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism. ‘Oh, I cannot imagine it!’ she cried. ‘I shall feel to my last hour.’ Then after a pause, in another tone, ‘But, Mr. Langham, you say music excites you, Wagner excites you?’ ‘Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,’ he admitted, smiling. ‘Well, then,’ and she looked at him persuasively, ‘why not give yourself up to music? It is so easy--so little trouble to oneself--it just takes you and carries you away.’ Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably through these admonitions of hers--that the situation had absurdity in it. ‘It is not my _métier_,’ he said hastily. ‘The self that enjoys music is an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short time. No, Miss Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will sing a _Te Deum_, I shall settle down in London, I shall keep a bit book going, and cheat the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.’ ‘And you will know, you will remember,’ she said faltering, reddening, her womanliness forcing the words out of her, ‘that you have friends: Robert--my sister--all of us?’ He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their eyes met each was struck once more with the personal beauty of the other. His eyes shone--their black depths seemed all tenderness. ‘I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,’ he said slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. She all but put her hand into his again, asking him childishly to hope, to be consoled. But the maidenly impulse restrained her, and once more he leant on the gate, burying his face in his hands. Suddenly he felt himself utterly tired, relaxed. Strong nervous reaction set in. What had all this scene, this tragedy been about? And then in another instant was that sense of the ridiculous again clamoring to be heard. He--the man of thirty-five--confessing himself, making a tragic scene, playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable, half-fledged creature, whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to hear--Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate, he found himself quivering with impatience to be away--by himself--out of reach--the critic in him making the most bitter, remorseless mock of all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for the life of him he could not find a word to say--a move to make. He stood hesitating, _gauche_, as usual.