The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had never before thought--of course not--what a hideous idea! That book, back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert's name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt Victoria's cool, casual voice as she explained, "Oh, just a young architect who used to--" Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying. His cool, spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again. And then, out of a mounting foam of arpeggios, there bloomed for her a new idea, solid enough, broad enough, high enough, for a refuge against all these wolfish fangs. She sat down to think it out, hot on the trail of an answer, the longed-for answer. It had just occurred to her that there was no possible logical connection between any of those skulking phantoms and the golden lovely things they tried to defile. Even if some people of wealth and ease and leisure were not as careful about moral values as about colors, and aesthetic harmonies--that meant nothing. The connection was purely fortuitous. How silly she had been not to see that. Grant, for purposes of argument, that Aunt Victoria was self-centered and had lived her life with too little regard for its effect on other people,--grant even that Felix had, under an almost overpowering temptation, not kept in a matter of conduct the same rigid nicety of fastidiousness which characterized his judgment of marbles--what of it? That did not mean that one could only be fine and true in conduct by giving up all lovely things and wearing hair-shirts. What an outgrown, mediaeval idea! How could she have been for a moment under its domination! It was just that old Puritanism, Spartanism of her childhood, which was continually reaching up its bony hand from the grave where she had interred it.