This was the box of bricks, the playing at her dignity. Every woman has them, and while some throw them at your head, the best make patterns--patterns of fine ladies and noble dames. It was a fine lady who would call him a funny little boy. It was a noble dame who would show him that she was not hurt. He had wanted her in his way, in their way--the way she wanted him as well. All men want some woman like that, and there are as good women to supply the need as there are bad ones who would shrink from it. And now, he wanted her no longer. She knew she had to bow her head to something that she could not understand, something that she could not supply. He loved. And they had so easily avoided it. "Are you going to be married?" she enquired. She longed to ask what the other one was like. John shrugged his shoulders. "You don’t know?" "No, I don’t know." "Does she love you?" "I couldn’t tell you." "You haven’t asked her?" "No--we haven’t said a word about it." She smiled. "Then why do you send me away?" "Because--I know, myself. There comes a time--I didn’t know it--when you know--a time when you don’t excuse yourself with the plea of humanity--when you wish to offer no excuse--when there is only one way, the way I’m choosing. I’m a crank, of course. I know you’ve called me that before. To you I’m a crank,--to heaps of other people as well. But in the back of this muddled head of mine, I’ve got an ideal--so has everyone else--so have you. But now I’ve found a means of expressing it. You say I’m in love--that’s what you call it. I prefer just to say, I love--which is another matter altogether. People fall in and out of love like an india-rubber ball dancing on a spray of water. But this sort of thing must be always, and it may be only once or twice in your life that you find a means of expressing it. But it’s there all the time. And one time it’s a woman with dark hair and another it’s a woman with gold--but the emotion--the heart of it is just the same. It’s the same love--the love of the good--the love of the beautiful--the love of the thing which is clean through and through and through. And when you meet it, you’ll sacrifice everything for it. And if you don’t meet it, you’ll go on hunting for it your life through--unless you lose heart, or lose character, or lose strength--then this wonderful ideal vanishes. You come to look for it less and less and less till at last you only seek for the other thing--what you call--falling in love." "Do you think we all have this ideal?" she asked. "Yes, every one of us." "Then have I lost it?" "No, I don’t believe so. I saw tears in your eyes just now." CHAPTER XVIII THE NONSENSE-MAKER