'Oh yes, you could. _Milieu_, environment is everything; but now, as I sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. You too--you are so very un-American. I always told you you were old-fashioned.' Charlie looked at her in silence a moment. 'And you,' he said at length--' you yourself? Have you changed, as Ginger prophesied? Do I seem to you more old-fashioned than ever? I am a very good test question, I imagine.' 'Why?' 'Because you have seen, have you not? a good deal of my double, Bilton. The contrast of our natures ought to be all the more apparent for the similarity of our appearance.' She got up. 'I have a great deal to talk to you about, Charlie,' she said; 'but it is after-dinner talk. A good deal is about you; the rest is about myself. I have also made another discovery: I am a more profound egotist than I knew. Did I always strike you as egotistic?' 'Dominant people are always egotistic,' said he. 'Dominant? Am I dominant? You will not think so when you have heard.' 'Have things gone wrong?' he asked. 'Yes--or right; I do not know which. Anyhow, they have gone differently to what I--well, planned. Now, the plans of dominant people go as they expect them to go.' 'Until they meet a more dominant person,' She shook her head. 'No, if my plans have been upset, anyhow, I have upset others,' she said. They dined rather silently, for both of them were thinking of the talk which was coming, and Sybil again was conscious of her own indecision. Then, after dinner, since delay only made her more heavily conscious of it, she went straight to the subject. 'Judy told me you had left Sheringham,' she said--'that you had practically taken yourself out of the hands of doctors who, humanly speaking, could probably have cured you. Do you think you have any right to do that?' 'My life is my own,' said he. 'Ah, I dispute that. One does not belong to one's self--at any rate, not wholly. One belongs to one's friends--to those who care for one.' 'Who cares for me? Bertie Keynes, I suppose, cares for me, but I entirely deny his right to any disposal of what I do.' 'Your mother, then.' 'In the main she agrees with me. Supposing I had cancer, she would not urge me for a moment to have an operation which was uncertain of success; and my case is similar.' Sybil was silent a moment. 'I, then,' she said. 'I entirely disapprove of your action. I care for you; you should consider me as well. It is in that sense your life is not your own; you have made yourself a niche, so to speak, in other people's lives; you have put an image of yourself there--given it them--and you have no right to take it away.' He took a cigarette from a box near him. 'And you are not allowed to smoke,' she added. He laughed and lit it.