Soon after this she took her leave; and all along the homeward walk through Badgering Woods she was conscious of feeling ashamed of herself--a very rare sensation with Elisabeth, and by no means an agreeable one. She was by nature so self-reliant and so irresponsible that she seldom regretted anything that she had done; if she had acted wisely, all was well; and if she had not acted wisely, it was over and done with, and what was the use of bothering any more about it? This was her usual point of view, and it proved as a rule a most comfortable one. But now she could not fail to see that she had been in the wrong--hopelessly and flagrantly in the wrong--and that she had behaved abominably to Christopher into the bargain. She had to climb down, as other ruling powers have had to climb down before now; and the act of climbing down is neither a becoming nor an exhilarating form of exercise to ruling powers. But at the back of her humble contrition there was a feeling of gladness in the knowledge that Christopher had not really failed her after all, and that her kingdom was still her own as it had been in her childish days; and there was also a nobler feeling of higher joy in the consciousness that--quite apart from his attitude toward her--Christopher was still the Christopher that she had always in her inmost soul believed him to be; that she was not wrong in the idea she had formed of him long ago. It is very human to be glad on our own account when people are as fond of us as we expected them to be; but it is divine to be glad, solely for their sakes, when they act up to their own ideals, quite apart from us. And there was a touch of divinity in Elisabeth's gladness just then, though the rest of her was extremely human--and feminine at that. On her way home she encountered Caleb Bateson going back to work after dinner, and she told him to ask Mr. Thornley to come up to the Willows that afternoon, as she wanted to see him. She preferred to send a verbal message, as by so doing she postponed for a few hours that climbing-down process which she so much disliked; although it is frequently easier to climb down by means of one's pen than by means of one's tongue. Christopher felt no pleasure in receiving her message. He was not angry with her, although he marvelled at the unreasonableness and injustice of a sex that thinks more of a day's pleasure than a life's devotion; he did not know that it was over the life's devotion and not the day's pleasure that Elisabeth had fought so hard that day; but his encounter with her had strangely tired him, and taken the zest out of his life, and he had no appetite for any more of such disastrous and inglorious warfare.