"Ah it's THEY, it's our poor twangers and twaddlers who remain outside. They pick up a living in the street. And who indeed would want them in?" Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet at the same time to have her idea. The subject, in truth, she evidently found, was not so easy to handle. "People lend me things, and I try; but at the end of fifty pages--" "There you are! Yes--heaven help us!" "But what I mean," she went on, "isn't that I don't get woefully weary of the eternal French thing. What's THEIR sense of life?" "AH VOILÀ!" Mrs. Dyott softly sounded. "Oh but it IS one; you can make it out," Voyt promptly declared. "They do what they feel, and they feel more things than we. They strike so many more notes, and with so different a hand. When it comes to any account of a relation say between a man and a woman--I mean an intimate or a curious or a suggestive one--where are we compared to them? They don't exhaust the subject, no doubt," he admitted; "but we don't touch it, don't even skim it. It's as if we denied its existence, its possibility. You'll doubtless tell me, however," he went on, "that as all such relations ARE for us at the most much simpler we can only have all round less to say about them." She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. "I beg your pardon. I don't think I shall tell you anything of the sort. I don't know that I even agree with your premiss." "About such relations?" He looked agreeably surprised. "You think we make them larger?--or subtler?" Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, at the fire, but at the ceiling. "I don't know what I think." "It's not that she doesn't know," Mrs. Dyott remarked. "It's only that she doesn't say." But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a moment he watched Maud. "It sticks out of you, you know, that you've yourself written something. Haven't you--and published? I've a notion I could read YOU." "When I do publish," she said without moving, "you'll be the last one I shall tell. I HAVE," she went on, "a lovely subject, but it would take an amount of treatment--!" "Tell us then at least what it is." At this she again met his eyes. "Oh to tell it would be to express it, and that's just what I can't do. What I meant to say just now," she added, "was that the French, to my sense, give us only again and again, for ever and ever, the same couple. There they are once more, as one has had them to satiety, in that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly again find them in the blue." "Then why do you keep reading about them?" Mrs. Dyott demanded. Maud cast about. "I don't!" she sighed. "At all events, I shan't any more. I give it up." "You've been looking for something, I judge," said Colonel Voyt, "that you're not likely to find. It doesn't exist." "What is it?" Mrs. Dyott desired to know. "I never look," Maud remarked, "for anything but an interest."