What men said of him had roused her incredulous admiration, and he seemed to dislike women as much as he respected them. His honesty, his deference, and his grave good looks attracted her from the first; his sympathy and discernment riveted the attraction. He reproved her optimism in vain; for was he not its embodiment? Terence, unconscious of being anything but a somewhat poor companion, discussed the sentiments she suggested, growing ever more astounded by her severance from realities, and more touched by her unhappy days. Of her husband's life he knew more than she had surmised, but she had surmised enough to make wifehood an indignity. His unfaithfulness, as a stye by which she had to live, soured for her every odour in the world. She had not the vigour to ignore it, nor the courage to escape. She had dreamed of marriage as a royal feast; she woke to find herself among the swine. The discovery would have hardened some women into defiance; some would have sheltered with it their own intrigues; but the shock cowed in her all further curiosity in existence. If life were really like the bit she had tasted, she preferred to starve. The other men she met seemed as horrible as her husband; they had the same speech, the same jests, the same dissipations. She shrank more and more into herself; even women revolted her by their tolerance of men's presumptions. Then Terence came. Like a plant grown in darkness, her anaemic delicacy of thought responded with an unhealthy exuberance to the first ray of sunlight. She listened to his silences and found them refreshing; then she drew him into speech. He spoke of much that she could not understand, but his obscurities were an intoxication, and not, as those of other men, a dread. She felt there was something wide and fine behind his words; a coherence, an integrity; she was vaguely pleased to feel it there, though its quality did not interest her at all. What did was her own expansion in the atmosphere of sympathetic confidence it had created. Her expansiveness was, at times, distasteful to him. The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools. Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men. "To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?" He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.