He looked at her almost with veneration. She was an unusually pretty girl, with an expression of sweetness and kindness which was more than her beauty. To him she seemed so far above all other girls whom he had ever seen as to be of a different flesh and spirit. Beatrix was even more beautiful than Caroline, and she was kind and sweet too, though with more contrariety in her. But to him she was common clay beside Caroline, whose lightest word he was inclined to receive as an oracle. Both of them seemed to him, in his self-respecting timidity, far above himself. He had had no contact with the life they represented before he had come to Abington, and thought himself quite unfitted to take part in it, with its ease and elaboration of wealth and unfamiliar custom marking it at every turn. To think of himself as anywhere on the same footing as these shining girls would have seemed to him hardly less presumptuous than to think of himself as on a level with a Royal Princess. But just as the goddesses of old time filled the hearts of mortal men with bliss by showing them what they shared with them, but never lost their godhead by so doing, so Caroline moved his wonder and admiration by letting him into some of the secret places of her nature, which was as fair as its outward form, but still remained high above him. "It's what I feel," he said gently, "though I lived a dull life before I came here, and you lived a gay one. I've given up nothing that I wanted. I enjoy my life much more; but still it's a good deal simpler than it was." "It comes of doing the work you like in the surroundings you like," she said sagely. "With a woman it isn't so much the work as all the little ways of spending her time. She doesn't as a rule, unless she's creative, or has to earn her own living, work by herself, or for herself. She is in touch with others all the time. I never thought of myself as having a place here, except the one I have always had at home. But I have, you know. I've made friends with a great many people. We all have. We know most of the people in the village, and all the children. I suppose I just thought of Abington, when we first came down, as a lovely house in which we could enjoy ourselves, by ourselves, or with the friends we asked to come here, and the people we should get to know in the houses round. I never thought of it as a place with a few hundred people living right round you. But now I know them, it's different. I have plenty of friends among them too, friends who tell me things about themselves, and like to hear what I have to tell them. I think I have made myself part of the machine, after all. But I like to think about it as a big family."