"The struggle, of course, would be terrible for a long while," Sylvia said to herself, "if everybody renounced entirely any kind of co-operation or interference with or imitation of or help from anybody else, but out of that struggle might arise the true immortals. A cat with a complete personality is surely higher than a man with an incomplete personality. Anyway, it's quite certain that this _cabotinage_ is for me impossible. I believe that if I pricked a vein sawdust would trickle out of me now." In such a mood of cheated hope did Sylvia return to Paris in the early spring; she was about to comment on Lily's usual state of molluscry, by yielding to which in abandoning the will she had lost the power to develop, when Lily herself proceeded to surprise her. The affection between Hector and Lily had apparently made a steady growth and had floated in an undisturbed and equable depth of water for so long that Lily, like an ambitious water-lily, began to be ambitious of becoming a terrestrial plant. While for nearly a year she had been blossoming apparently without regard for anything but the beauty of the moment, she had all the time been sending out long roots beneath the water, long roots that were growing more and more deeply into the warm and respectable mud. "You mean you'd like to marry Hector?" Sylvia asked. "Why, yes, I think I should, rather. I'm getting tired of never being settled." "But does he want to marry you?" "We've talked about it often. He hates the idea of not marrying me." "He'd like to go away with you and live on the top of a mountain remote from mankind, or upon a coral island in the Pacific with nothing but the sound of the surf and the cocoanuts dropping idly one by one, wouldn't he?" "Well, he did say he wished we could go away somewhere all alone. How did you guess? How clever you are, Sylvia!" Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes. "My dear girl, when a man knows that it's impossible to be married either because he's married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He's in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons. I suppose he has also talked of a dream-child--a fairy miniature of his Lily?" Sylvia went on. "We have talked about a baby," Lily admitted. "The man with serious intentions talks about the aspect of the nursery and makes reluctant plans to yield, if compelled to, the room he had chosen for his study." "You make fun of everything," Lily murmured, rather sulkily.