“Never mind that now,” he said, with the shadow of a returning smile. “Rather strange things are stirring in me just now, and who knows but I may attempt something yet? But before all else, I must make clear for once what I am and for what I lived. There are men like me in the world; I am far from thinking they are the best or the most valuable; but they exist, to confound all the clever people and the realists and the new novelists. There has been and there is only one thing for me; something that in the normal sense I never even knew. I walked about the world blind, with my eyes turned inwards, looking at you. For days after a night when I had dreamed of you, I was broken; like a man who had seen a ghost. I read over and over the great and grave lines of the old poets, because they alone were worthy of you. And when I saw you again by chance, I thought the world had already ended; and it was that return and tryst beyond the grave that is too good to be true.” “I do not think,” she answered in a low voice, “that the belief is too good to be true.” As he looked at her a thrill went through him like a message too swift to be understood; and at the back of his mind something awoke that repeated again and again like a song the same words: “too good to be true.” There was always something pathetic, even in her days of pride, about the short-sighted look of her half-closed eyes; but it was for other reasons that they were now blinking in the strong white sunlight, almost as if they were blind. They were blind and bright with tears: she mastered her voice and it was steady. “You talk about failures,” she said. “I suppose most people would call me a failure and all my people failures now; except those who would say we never failed, because we never had to try. Anyhow, we’re all poor enough now; I don’t know whether you know that I’m teaching music. I dare say we deserved to go. I dare say we were useless. Some of us tried to be harmless. But--but now I _must_ say something, about some of us who tried rather hard to be harmless--in that way. The new people will tell you those ideals were Victorian and Tennysonian, and all the rest of it--well, it doesn’t matter what they say. They know quite as little about us as we about them. But to you, when you talk like that ... what can I do, but tell you that if we were stiff, if we were cold, if we were careful and conservative, it was because deep down in our souls some of us _did_ believe that there might be loyalty and love like that, for which a woman might well wait even to the end of the world. What is it to these people if we choose not to be drugged or distracted with anything less worthy? But it would be hard indeed if when I find it _does_ exist after all ... hard on you, harder on me, if when I had really found it at last....” The catch in her voice came again and silence caught and held her.