Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt, "They're shown often, no doubt, as paying for their badness. But are they shown as paying for their romance?" "My dear lady," said Voyt, "their romance is their badness. There isn't any other. It's a hard law, if you will, and a strange, but goodness has to go without that luxury. Isn't to BE good just exactly, all round, to go without?" He put it before her kindly and clearly--regretfully too, as if he were sorry the truth should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant eyes seemed to say, would, had they had the making of it, have made it better. "One has heard it before--at least I have; one has heard your question put. But always, when put to a mind not merely muddled, for an inevitable answer. 'Why don't you, CHER MONSIEUR, give us the drama of virtue?' 'Because, CHÈRE MADAME, the high privilege of virtue is precisely to avoid drama.' The adventures of the honest lady? The honest lady hasn't, can't possibly have, adventures." Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smiling with some intensity. "Doesn't it depend a little on what you call adventures?" "My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott as if in compassion for sophistry so simple, "adventures are just adventures. That's all you can make of them!" But her friend talked for their companion and as if without hearing. "Doesn't it depend a good deal on what you call drama?" Maud spoke as one who had already thought it out. "Doesn't it depend on what you call romance?" Her listener gave these arguments his very best attention. "Of course you may call things anything you like--speak of them as one thing and mean quite another. But why should it depend on anything? Behind these words we use--the adventure, the novel, the drama, the romance, the situation, in short, as we most comprehensively say--behind them all stands the same sharp fact which they all in their different ways represent." "Precisely!" Mrs. Dyott was full of approval. Maud however was full of vagueness. "What great fact?" "The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation; the relation's an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one. The subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for the most part the decline of one. And what is the honest lady doing on that side of the town?" Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. "She doesn't so much as FORM a relation." But Maud bore up. "Doesn't it depend again on what you call a relation?" "Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, "if a gentleman picks up her pocket-handkerchief--" "Ah even that's one," their friend laughed, "if she has thrown it to him. We can only deal with one that is one." "Surely," Maud replied. "But if it's an innocent one--" "Doesn't it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked, "on what you call innocent?"