“But after all,” Charles said more clearly, “it doesn’t matter about being acclaimed. It’s just like making music for deaf people: the music’s there; the music’s there. And so it doesn’t matter very much whether you love me. It’s one’s weakness that wants that, one’s loneliness. I can love you just the same, perhaps better; it’s the audience that spoils things. I should think it does!” “So you’re quite happy.” “Not quite,” he answered, “but I have something to do, something I can do, too. Music—no, I’m not good enough. I’m no more than an amateur, but in this I can be supreme.” “You can’t be sure of that,” she said acutely. “If you wrote a poem you might think it was perfect, but you wouldn’t absolutely know till you’d tried it on other people. So you can’t be sure about love.” “You mightn’t be,” he said with a touch of scorn. “You may depend on other people, but I don’t.” She made a small sound of scorn. “No, you’ll never know whether you’re doing this wonderful work of yours well or not because,” she said, cruelly exultant, “it won’t be tested.” “Ah, but it might be. You’ve got to do things as though they will be.” “I suppose so,” she said indifferently. “And now I must go back.” He turned obediently and thrust the parcel at her. “But aren’t you going to take me home?” she asked. “No, I don’t think I need do that. I shall stay here.” “Then I won’t have your chocolates. I didn’t want them, anyhow, but now I won’t take them.” “I don’t understand you,” he said miserably. “Doesn’t the painter understand his paints or the musician his instruments? No, you’ll have to begin at the beginning, Charles Batty, and work very hard before you’re a success.” She ran from him fleetly, hardly knowing why she was so angry, but it seemed to her that he had no right to be content without her love; she felt he must be emasculate, and the guilty passion of Francis Sales was, by contrast, splendid. But for that passion, Charles Batty might have persuaded her she was incapable of rousing men’s desire and not to rouse it was not to be a woman. Accordingly, she valued Francis and despised the other, yet when she had reached home and run upstairs and was standing in the dim room where the firelight cast big, uncertain shadows, like vague threats, on walls and ceiling, she suffered a reaction.