He glanced up at Toppie to see how she accepted the metaphor; but if she smiled it was with reserve. “You like me, Giles. I’m not caviare; but I’m not, I hope, rice pudding either.” “No, you don’t come into such categories,” Giles smiled back. “If one could find a fruit that tasted of frost and sunlight, a fruit one could pick only at daybreak—golden, and chill and sweet—that would be you, Toppie. A sort of apple of the Hesperides—that one must sail and sail for ever and a day to find.” Something that came into his voice made him stop suddenly. And Toppie, too, was silent for a moment. When she spoke it was carefully, as if guiding their steps away from a menace to their quiet. “That’s a charming compliment, Giles,” she said. “I sometimes think, shambling and shabby though you call yourself, that you are a poet as well as a philosopher. But I’m sorry, you know, to feel madame Vervier lose by what I gain. Owen always wrote of her as someone he so wanted me to know. I can’t believe he’d have wanted me to know anyone who was worldly and luxurious and meretricious. I can’t help feeling that you must be unjust.” Meretricious, luxurious, worldly? Was that the picture he had, all unwittingly, drawn for Toppie? The blood came to Giles’s face. It was to be displayed to his own eyes as disloyal. He saw madame Vervier’s figure standing against the great arch of the sky; he saw her rising up from the sea at dawn; he smelt the beeswax and seashells and cool, clean linen. “But I don’t mean that at all,” he stammered. “I don’t think of her as any of those things. Nothing could be further from my mind.” “If she’s like the things rich people eat in restaurants; if she’s selfish; if she’s unfastidious and resourceful—” Toppie’s voice built up before him the shape of madame Vervier as she had seen him draw it. “You mustn’t press mere metaphor so far, Toppie. I said she was like a flower, too. She is as out-of-door a creature as Alix herself. She belongs more to the cliffs and the country than to restaurants.—That’s really the most vivid impression I have of her”—he was striving to atone to madame Vervier for the false picture he had put before Toppie; yet trying at the same time for truth to Toppie. “As I used to see her at sunrise; coming up from the sea after a morning swim. Like poetry and music personified, she used to look, walking against the dawn.” Toppie’s eyes were on him. It was curious how cold her eyes could be. It was as if, though Toppie herself were not judging you, the height, the light that her eyes conveyed revealed you to her as creeping and dingy. “I don’t understand you,” she said. She spoke gently, as if to mitigate the coldness that fell from her gaze.