She made this statement for about the hundredth time, and the artist, as usual, completely ignored the allusion to her ambiguous position at Greta Bridge. And yet--he was obviously Bohemian, but of the world where such social rules are used to be enforced. Another instance of the anomalousness of the artist nature! She was not without tact, though she was so impulsive, and she now fancied, with the morbid and strained apprehension of one whose feelings are deeply engaged, that he was colder to her as they walked home together. She felt, in some indefinable way, that she had lost ground with him, and that her relation of and flippant comments on the story of Phœbe Elles had been the cause of it. Her brain was working furiously as she walked on, treading rough and smooth at his side, her head bowed, and her eyes fixed on the enormous dried-up hoof marks that the cows had made on their way down the bank to drink at the ford, and into which she sedulously and mechanically made a point of fitting her little foot. Higher up, in the upland field, the footpath was so narrow that she was obliged to walk, not beside, but in front of Rivers, who was universally beloved of farmers because of his fixed principle never heedlessly to widen a footpath, though he would fight tooth and nail for the right of way. He and she were thus perforce more or less silent, but nothing would have surprised the modest artist more than to think that he himself was the subject of the cogitations that were agitating the brain behind the little knot of brown curls which was presented to his gaze, as they walked along about a yard apart from each other. “I have vexed him--I have shocked him! He is a gentleman, and he isn’t modern, thank God!--and I have talked flippantly of things that a gentleman--and an old-fashioned gentleman--takes seriously. He has a higher moral standard than I have, and I have been fool enough to let him see that mine is lower. How tiresome!” Then she consoled herself a little. “He is sweet, but he is not quite human. It is very easy to talk about duties and self-effacement and all that, but what can a bachelor--he is not married, I am sure--what can a hermit, a recluse, know of the stress of life? How can a bachelor possibly enter into the agonies of the married? How can Alastor sympathize with the miseries of Incompatibles?” “You must think me a very odd kind of woman,” she said to him that night, adding hastily: “That is, if you think about me at all.” It was a habit of hers to put leading questions of this kind to the artist, but generally, like Pilate, she stayed not for an answer, and nervously hastened to fill up the pause by a further remark of her own. The result was a somewhat one-sided conversation.