I remember the awkwardness I felt at these indelicate thrusts into topics I had come to regard as forbidden. "I suppose there's a sort of truth in them," I said, and then more Siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are----" "Yes," she said. "But that doesn't matter to us. Endless people wiser than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are have said exactly the opposite. It's _we_ who have to understand--for ourselves.... We don't understand, Stephen." I was forced to a choice between faith and denial. But I parried with questions. "Don't you," I asked, "feel there is a God?" She hesitated. "There is something--something very beautiful," she said and stopped as if her breath had gone. "That is all I know, Stephen...." And I remember too that we talked endlessly about the things I was to do in the world. I do not remember that we talked about the things she was to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the purposes of life. I became Man in her imagination, the protagonist of the world. At first I displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable service that Harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "Do some decent public work," I said, or some such phrase. "But is that All you want?" I hear her asking. "Is that All you want?" I lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife. "Before I met you it was," I said. "And now?" "I want you." "I'm nothing to want. I want you to want all the world.... _Why shouldn't you?_" I think I must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "Yes, but splendidly," she insisted. "Not doing little things for other people--who aren't doing anything at all. I want you to conquer people and lead people.... When I see you, Stephen, sometimes--I almost wish I were a man. In order to be able to do all the things that you are going to do." "For you," I said, "for you." I stretched out my hand for hers, and my gesture went disregarded. She sat rather crouched together with her eyes gazing far away across the great spaces of the park. "That is what women are for," she said. "To make men see how splendid life can be. To lift them up--out of a sort of timid grubbiness----" She turned upon me suddenly. "Stephen," she said, "promise me. Whatever you become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like--like everybody. Ever." "I swear," I said. "By me." "By you. No book to kiss! Please, give me your hand." § 8