“Yes. Beautifully dignified; beautifully secure. I always feel of Alix that she would be safe, always and everywhere. Yes; those are just the words for Alix.” “And it’s not exactly righteousness, is it?” Giles went on, finding more words since Toppie liked these ones. “It’s integrity. Like a little noble Roman girl.” “Integrity. Yes.” Toppie mused on Alix. But then, alas, she came back to Alix’s mother. “The same in loveliness; the same in dignity and security.—In what ways different, then, Giles?” He knew that there was hardly anything he could say of madame Vervier that it would not be unwise to say. He watched an ant, disturbed by his change of posture, thread its anxious way amongst the tufts of heather and felt that he was like the ant. He, too, must go forward and find the path that promised most safety. “Well, she’s more impulsive, I feel; more selfish; less fastidious.” Toppie, for a moment, reflected in silence. He saw her dimly, sitting there beside him, a grey silhouette against the sky. “Less fastidious?” she then said, and it was as if he had presented her with an object that she turned reluctantly, and with surprise, in her hands: “How strange. Owen gave me no impression of that. He gave me the impression of someone quite finished, quite exquisite; in every way. How do you mean less fastidious?” “Oh, I don’t exactly know,” said Giles, and he feared it was uneasily. “Merely in the sense, perhaps, that she’d put up with all sorts of queer people, for the sake of not being bored, that Alix wouldn’t care to have. She is exquisite; very exquisite.” “You did like her, didn’t you, Giles? Very, very much?” “Well, hardly very, very,” he qualified, pausing with wary antennæ, as it were. “She’s not my sort, really. That’s all that it comes to.” He could not see Toppie’s features, but he felt her more intent, and in her next words he saw that he had seemed to call Owen’s taste in question—as well as madame Vervier’s. “Wasn’t that only because you didn’t see enough of her? She was so much Owen’s sort.” “It doesn’t follow she’d be mine, would it? Owen and I were really very different, weren’t we, Toppie, dear?” “Yes; very different. But you always liked the same people. It surprises me—so much—that you shouldn’t like Alix’s mother.” “But I didn’t say that, Toppie! ‘Liking’ isn’t the word. She is charming. She is too charming; that’s what it comes to.” Giles felt himself go forward to a new outlet. “Too much the woman of fashion; too sophisticated and highly flavoured for anyone so simple as I am. You know I am much simpler than Owen. He was a man of the world, and I, however long I live, will never be a man of the world. If one’s just the shambling, shabby, scholastic type one will never feel at home with brilliant, resourceful people. It’s as if”—Giles found the simile with satisfaction—“I liked rice pudding while Owen could appreciate caviare. Madame Vervier is caviare, as far as I am concerned.”