She was so warm and friendly and close in one sense, and so nowhere at all in another; so responsive, so quick, so ready to pile the sweetest honey of flattery and admiration on him, and so blank to the fact that--well, that there they were, he and she. And then she had a sense of fun that interrupted, a sense most admirable in a woman at any other time, but not when she is being made love to. Also she was very irrelevant; he could not fix her; she tumbled about mentally, and that hindered progress, too. Not that he cared a straw for her mentality except in so far as its quality was a hindrance; it was that other part of her, her queer little soul that interested him, her happiness and zest of life, and, of course, the graces and harmonies of her lines and colouring. "You know, I suppose," he said to her one evening as they walked slowly back along the path through the rye-field, and the cool scents of the ended summer's day rose in their faces as they walked, "that I'd give a hundred days of life in London or Paris for an hour of this atmosphere, this cleanness that there is about you." "I don't think a hundred's much. I'd give them _all_ to be with you. Here. Now. In the rye-field. Isn't it wonderful this evening--isn't it beautiful? Did you smell that?" She stopped and raised her nose selectingly. "Just that instant? That's convolvulus." "You have such faith in my gods," he went on, when he could get her away from the convolvulus, "such a bravery of belief, such a dear bravery of belief." "Well, but of course," she said, turning shining eyes on to him. "Who wouldn't believe in your gods? Art, love of beauty--" "But it isn't only art. My gods are all sweet things and all fine things," said Ingram, convinced at the moment that he had never done anything but worship gods of that particular flavour, so thoroughly was he being purged by the hyssop of life in Kökensee. "Oh," said Ingeborg with an awed enthusiasm, "how wonderful it is that you should be exactly what you are! But it's _clever_ of you," she added with a little movement of her hands, smiling up at him, "to be so _exactly_ what you are." "And do you know what exactly you are? You're the open window in the prison-house of my life." She held her breath a moment. "How very beautiful!" she then said. "How _very_ beautiful! And how kind you are to think of me like that! But why is it a prison-house? You of all people--" "It isn't living, you see. It's existence in caricature over there. It's like dining perpetually with Madame Tussaud's waxworks, or anything else totally unreal and incredible." "But I don't understand how a great artist--" "And you're like an open window, like the sky, like sweet air, like freedom, like secret light--" "Oh," she murmured, deprecating but enchanted. "When I'm with you I feel an intolerable disgust for all the chatter and flatulence of that other life." "And when I'm with you," she said, "I feel as if I were stuffed with--oh, with stars."