He dropped her wrist, and cowered away from the cliff as if he were shrinking from a nightmare horror, while she began to move slowly in the direction of the college. The very act of retreat aroused within her the emotion which, curiously enough, she had not experienced in the crisis of danger. It was not fear that made her flee, but her flight that produced the fear; and the possibility of the crime, the grewsome picture it suggested, flashed upon her with such sinister power that her knees weakened and caused her to stumble. He overtook her in a few long strides, and walked beside her in dumb penitence. "You 'll never forgive me now, Felicity," he said, when he could bear the silence no longer, "never--never!" "We 'll not talk of forgiveness any more on either side," she returned wearily. "We 're merely going round and round in a circle, without arriving at any conclusion." His own nature shared her reaction from intense emotion to indifference, and again silence fell between them. Apparently, they were scarcely better able to understand each other than if they spoke in different languages, and each took refuge in incommunicable thoughts. It would always be thus, she reflected, if they lived together; no community of interests, herself living in a region apart, which he was generations short of being able to enter. Nothing would remain but practical politics, and already she sickened of the sordid subject. Unionism, public ownership of public utilities versus private privilege, charges and counter-charges of political corruption, problems of taxation--such things would constitute his sole interest in life and the gist of his conversation. It was not enough that he talked intelligently, even eloquently, on these subjects. Her active mind had already exhausted their possibilities, and what to her was a mere by-play of the intellect was to him the be-all and end-all of existence. Of the books she had given him, he understood and appropriated only those parts that related to his subject. All the rest was lost: the literary quality, the atmosphere, the historic perspective. To him it could never mean anything that Plato saw the Parthenon. This fact indicated a limitation, a reason why he could never develop from the politician into the statesman, why, for example, she knew that he was not the kind of man to become a cabinet officer or ambassador. She would be merely the wife of a mayor, or at the most, of a governor or representative. And she knew she would never respect his opinions, that he was one who might champion crude and undigested theories, theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings against the bars in vain.