It moved him--moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying to himself: “Good God, if she were not so hideously rich--” and then of yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all that he and she might do with those very riches which he dreaded. After all, there was nothing mean in her ideals they were hard and material, in keeping with her primitive and massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility. And when she spoke of “the other kind of greatness” he knew that she understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There was not a drop of guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled. “The other kind of greatness?” he repeated. “Well, isn’t that what you said happiness was? I wanted to be happy... but one can’t choose.” He went up to her. “No, one can’t choose. And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn’t got it himself?” He took her hands, feeling how large, muscular and voluntary they were, even as they melted in his palms. “My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need is to be loved.” She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances: “No,” she said gallantly, “but just to love.” PART III XXV IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing walked back alone from the school at which she had just deposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy where, for the last two months, she had been living with them. She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year’s hat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in which they could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were a single tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of the house in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting for them--and which, of course, were it the bonne’s room in the attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept, had been singled out by them for that very reason. These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to Susy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many characteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now she felt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, and the search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal or individual, was as exciting to her as the development of a detective story.