But how different from those comfortable excursions, as straightforward and as uneventful to him in their transitory salubrious warming as bread and milk, was this running away! It was distressingly different. Almost, except that he had no desire to laugh, ridiculously different. The first step, the process of the actual removal from Kökensee to Berlin, from legality to illicitness, had in its smoothness been positively glib; and he had supposed that, once alone together, love-making, which was the very marrow of running away--else why run?--would follow with a similar glibness. Nothing, however, seemed less inclined to follow. The only things that did follow were two confused exasperating days in which his moods varied with every hour, almost at last with everything she said. The capaciousness of her beliefs and acceptances amazed him. They were as capacious as her enthusiasms. She believed so firmly what he had told her over there away in Kökensee, where of course a man had to say things in order to get a beginning made, about the friendly frequent journeyings of other people, she had so heartily accepted his assurance that it was absurd and disgraceful in its suggestion of evil-mindedness not to travel frankly anywhere with anybody--"Are we not the children of light, you and I?" he had asked her--the things a man says! he thought; but they should not be brought up against him in this manner, clad in an invincible armour of acceptance--"And shall we be hindered in our free comings and goings by the dingy scruples of those heavy others, the groping and afraid children of darkness?"--that plainly the idea that she was doing anything even remotely wrong had not occurred to her. The basis of her holiday was this belief in frank companionship. She had no difficulty, he observed, himself infinitely fretted by this constant closeness to her, in being just a frank companion. She was so carelessly secure in friendship, so empty of any thought beside, that she could and did say things to him which said by any other woman in the same situation would have instantly led to lovemaking. But Ingram, who was fastidious, could no more make love to her, violently begin, robustly stand no nonsense, so long as she was steeped in obliviousness, than he could to a child or a chair. There must be some response, some consciousness. Her obtuseness to the real situation was so terribly healthy minded that it was almost a disease; the awful candour of soul of bishops' daughters and pastors' wives appalled him.