He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended, with his friendly, his easy, his indescribable competence, for Gedge--poor Gedge who quite held his breath and who felt, in the most unexpected way, that he had somehow never been in such good society. The young wife, who for herself meanwhile had continued to look about, sighed out, smiled out--Gedge couldn't have told which--her little answer to these remarks. "It's rather a pity, you know, that He _isn't_ here. I mean as Goethe's at Weimar. For Goethe _is_ at Weimar." "Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks. _This_ man isn't anywhere. I defy you to catch him." "Why not say, beautifully," the young woman laughed, "that, like the wind, He's everywhere?" It wasn't of course the tone of discussion, it was the tone of pleasantry, though of better pleasantry, Gedge seemed to feel, and more within his own appreciation, than he had ever listened to; and this was precisely why the young man could go on without the effect of irritation, answering his wife but still with eyes for their companion. "I'll be hanged if He's _here_!" It was almost as if he were taken--that is, struck and rather held--by their companion's unruffled state, which they hadn't meant to ruffle, but which suddenly presented its interest, perhaps even projected its light. The gentleman didn't know, Gedge was afterwards to say to himself, how that hypocrite was inwardly all of a tremble, how it seemed to him his fate was being literally pulled down on his head. He was trembling for the moment certainly too much to speak; abject he might be, but he didn't want his voice to have the absurdity of a quaver. And the young woman--charming creature!--still had another word. It was for the guardian of the spot, and she made it in her way delightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies, where she had been looking for a minute, with a ruefulness just marked enough to be pretty, at the queer old floor. "Then if you say it _wasn't_ in this room He was born--well, what's the use?" "What's the use of what?" her husband asked. "The use, you mean, of our coming here? Why the place is charming in itself. And it's also interesting," he added to Gedge, "to know how you get on." Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but answering the young woman first. If poor Isabel, he was thinking, could only have been like that!--not as to youth, beauty, arrangement of hair or picturesque grace of hat--these things he didn't mind; but as to sympathy, facility, light perceptive, and yet not cheap, detachment! "I don't say it wasn't--but I don't say it _was_." "Ah but doesn't that," she returned, "come very much to the same thing? And don't They want also to see where He had His dinner and where He had His tea?" "They want everything," said Morris Gedge. "They want to see where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and where His mother boiled her pot." "But if you don't show them----?"