"You are a man; you know him; you know all sorts of things--all sorts of ways of looking at things, I don't know. If you could go so far--as to be frank." "Well," said Melville and stopped. She hung over him as it were, as a tense silence. "There _is_ a difference," he admitted, and still went unhelped. "How can I put it? I think in certain ways you contrast with her, in a way that makes things easier for her. He has--I know the thing sounds like cant, only you know, _he_ doesn't plead it in defence--he has a temperament, to which she sometimes appeals more than you do." "Yes, I know, but how?" "Well----" "Tell me." "You are austere. You are restrained. Life--for a man like Chatteris--is schooling. He has something--something perhaps more worth having than most of us have--but I think at times--it makes life harder for him than it is for a lot of us. Life comes at him, with limitations and regulations. He knows his duty well enough. And you-- You mustn't mind what I say too much, Miss Glendower--I may be wrong." "Go on," she said, "go on." "You are too much--the agent general of his duty." "But surely!--what else----?" "I talked to him in London and then I thought he was quite in the wrong. Since that I've thought all sorts of things--even that you might be in the wrong. In certain minor things." "Don't mind my vanity now," she cried. "Tell me." "You see you have defined things--very clearly. You have made it clear to him what you expect him to be, and what you expect him to do. It is like having built a house in which he is to live. For him, to go to her is like going out of a house, a very fine and dignified house, I admit, into something larger, something adventurous and incalculable. She is--she has an air of being--_natural_. She is as lax and lawless as the sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind. She doesn't--if I may put it in this way--she doesn't love and respect him when he is this, and disapprove of him highly when he is that; she takes him altogether. She has the quality of the open sky, of the flight of birds, of deep tangled places, she has the quality of the high sea. That I think is what she is for him, she is the Great Outside. You--you have the quality----" He hesitated. "Go on," she insisted. "Let us get the meaning." "Of an edifice.... I don't sympathise with him," said Melville. "I am a tame cat and I should scratch and mew at the door directly I got outside of things. I don't want to go out. The thought scares me. But he is different." "Yes," she said, "he is different." For a time it seemed that Melville's interpretation had hold of her. She stood thoughtful. Slowly other aspects of the thing came into his mind.