"Why _me_?" "Because he tells you more in five minutes than he'd tell me in five years." She half smiled. "That's true. In some ways I can twist him round my little finger.... But in other ways he's just rock--solid rock--don't you feel that?" She caressed the cat and went on: "I'm not a sentimentalist. I don't believe it's a sin to experiment on animals if by doing so you have a chance of benefiting human lives, and I'm not so absurd as to believe that vivisectors are all sadists. So it isn't anything to do with _that_.... But, all the same, I feel that he's not human. I don't mean that he's _in_human. I mean that he's just _un_human--the humanity in him hasn't ever yet been stirred. He just lives for that high ideal--at two hundred a year. It's splendid, I know, but from a woman's point of view, at any rate, it's just a shade unsatisfactory." "I don't suppose he ever considers the woman's point of view." "Of course he doesn't. That's part of the trouble. He's got his eyes fixed on this distant goal and he doesn't see the other things nearer his eyes. He doesn't see that if a man's going to be a success in this world he's got to make friends and go about and not be satisfied with two hundred pounds a year." (The money seemed to obsess her.) "He'd tell you he didn't want to be that sort of success." "But he _must_ be, if he's going to be any other sort of success in addition. Even the medieval saints, who made a virtue of poverty, used to make an advertisement of it as well. He doesn't do even that. Of course I don't say he need be an absolutely worldly success like Geoffrey. He couldn't be if he tried, I'm sure. But I think he might compromise." She added after a pause: "It would do him good to fall in love." I laughed then. "He's not likely to do that. He's scared of women altogether, and--excepting you--I've never known him to be at ease in a woman's presence. When some of his girl students come to ask him about their work, he stammers and looks uncomfortable till they're gone." We talked on for a short time longer, and then she said she must go. She put the cat into a chair and gave a final stroke to its sleek head. "A saucer of milk after I've gone," she said, "is the best I can do for him, isn't it? Will you give it him?" I promised I would, and then, as I helped her on with her coat, she added: "I'm going to try to convert him. Terrington, I mean, not the cat.... And I shall begin by calling him Terry. Do you think he'll mind?" I said laughingly that I didn't suppose he would encourage the liberty. We walked out to Gower Street together, and I got her a taxi. "I daresay it'll be a hard job," she said finally, as she shook hands, "but I mean to do it." VII