"You are making love to me, and that is quite as it should be," she said. "But on the most beautiful of all days I have the saddest thoughts, for though you laughed at me when I talked about restraint, I was really very serious indeed. I know a lot about restraint, my dear, and how the lack of it can make life suddenly very horrible ... for once upon a time I killed an old man because I didn't know the line between my desires and his endurance." She shook her head at me gently. "No, that won't do, Dikran. You were going to say something pretty about my good manners, but that is all so much play-acting, and, besides, good manners are my trade and profession, and without them I should long ago have been down and under, as I deserve to be much more than Emma Hamilton ever did.... The tragedy about people like me is that we step into life at the deep end and find only the shallow people there, and when we meet some one really deep and very sincere, like that old man, we rather resent it, for we can't gauge him by the standards we use for each other. Men like that bring a sudden reality into life, but the reality is unacceptable and always ugly because it is forced upon one, while the only realities that are beautiful are those that were born in your heart when you were born; just like your country for you, which you have never seen and may never see, and yet has been your main reality in life since you were born; a reality as sad and beautiful as the ancestral memories which must lurk somewhere in you, but which you can't express because you have not learnt yet how to be really natural with yourself. And when you have learnt that you will have learnt the secret of great writing, for literature is the natural raw material which every man secretes within himself, but only a few can express it to the world. But I may be wrong about all that, and anyway you must know a great deal more about great thinking and great writing than I do, for you have read about it in dull books while I have only sensed it in my trivial way...." "Shelmerdene, I want to hear about your old man," I said, "whom you say you killed. But that is only your way of saying that he was in love with you, and that you hurt him so much that he died of it."