She cared intensely for the one thing he cared for, and not less intensely (and here was the wonder to him) for all the other things that existed outside his interests. For her, life was everything, and everything was a part of life. She would have given everything she had to become a great player; but, if you found your way down to the root of things, her feeling for music was neither more nor less than her feeling for every form of art, and her feeling for art, which was unerring, was the same thing as her feeling for skating or dancing. She got as much pleasure from bending a supple binding in her hand as from reading the poems inside it. She made no selections in life, beyond picking out all the beautiful and pleasant things, whatever they might be. Trevalga studied her with amazement; he felt withered, shrivelled up, in body and soul, beside her magnificent acceptance of the world; she vitalised him, drew him away from himself; and he feared her. He feared women. To live with a woman, thought Christian, in the same house, the same room with her, is as if the keeper were condemned to live by day and sleep by night in the wild beast's cage. It is to be on one's guard at every minute, to apprehend always the claws behind the caressing softness of their padded coverings, to be continually ready to amuse one's dangerous slave, with one's life for the forfeit. The strain of it, the trial to the nerves, the temper! it was not to be thought of calmly. He looked around him, and saw all the other keepers of these ferocious, uncertain creatures, wearing out their lives in the exciting companionship; and a dread of women took the place of his luxurious indifference, as he imagined himself actually playing the part, too. It would be, he saw, a conflict of egoisms, and he could not afford to risk his own. Woman, as he saw her, is the beast of prey: rapacious of affection, time, money, all the flesh and all the soul, one's nerves, one's attention, pleasure, duty, art itself! She is the rival of the idea, and she never pardons. She requires the sacrifice of the whole man; nothing less will satisfy her; and, to love a woman is, for an artist, to change one's religion. Christian had tried honestly to explain himself to Rana, but the girl would not understand him. She cared for his art as much as he did; she would never come between him and his art; she would hate him if he preferred her to his art. She said all that, sincerely; but he shook his head obstinately, a little sadly, knowing that for him possible things were impossible. The mere presence of any one he cared for, all the more if he cared for her a great deal, disturbed him, upset his life. And he must keep his life intact while he might.