"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves. If I once go, I shall never come back--never. There's no use thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking at it and touching it and letting it go." "Do you apply that principle to everything?" "Nearly everything." "H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise." "Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to starvation after luxury?" "Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw a day. But in the end, you know, it dies." "If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it might not look pretty." At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he forgave her because of her evident sincerity. She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections. So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm. It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal effort not to be. He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire her courage. That uncompromising attitude was more dignified than the hesitations of weaker natures. When women set out with the bold intention of living resolutely in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful, they sometimes find themselves brought up sharply midway at the threshold of the Good; and there they stand vacillating all the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser values, there was something in her which would always mark her from Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or nothing; either four bare walls or the open road where there is no returning. She would go no way where the Colonel could not follow.