"Do we? Is it finer? Why should it be finer to see beauty where it is fatal to us to see it? Why? Unless we are to believe there is no reason in things, why should this--impossibility, be beautiful to any one anyhow? Put it as a matter of reason, Melville. Why should _her_ smile be so sweet to me, why should _her_ voice move me! Why her's and not Adeline's? Adeline has straight eyes and clear eyes and fine eyes, and all the difference there can be, what is it? An infinitesimal curving of the lid, an infinitesimal difference in the lashes--and it shatters everything--in this way. Who could measure the difference, who could tell the quality that makes me _swim_ in the sound of her voice.... The difference? After all, it's a visible thing, it's a material thing! It's in my eyes. By Jove!" he laughed abruptly. "Imagine old Helmholtz trying to gauge it with a battery of resonators, or Spencer in the light of Evolution and the Environment explaining it away!" "These things are beyond measurement," said Melville. "Not if you measure them by their effect," said Chatteris. "And anyhow, why do they take us? That is the question I can't get away from just now." My cousin meditated, no doubt with his hands deep in his trousers' pockets. "It is illusion," he said. "It is a sort of glamour. After all, look at it squarely. What is she? What can she give you? She promises you vague somethings.... She is a snare, she is deception. She is the beautiful mask of death." "Yes," said Chatteris. "I know." And then again, "I know. "There is nothing for me to learn about that," he said. "But why--why should the mask of death be beautiful? After all-- We get our duty by good hard reasoning. Why should reason and justice carry everything? Perhaps after all there are things beyond our reason, perhaps after all desire has a claim on us?" He stopped interrogatively and Melville was profound. "I think," said my cousin at last, "Desire _has_ a claim on us. Beauty, at any rate---- "I mean," he explained, "we are human beings. We are matter with minds growing out of ourselves. We reach downward into the beautiful wonderland of matter, and upward to something--" He stopped, from sheer dissatisfaction with the image. "In another direction, anyhow," he tried feebly. He jumped at something that was not quite his meaning. "Man is a sort of half-way house--he must compromise." "As you do?" "Well. Yes. I try to strike a balance."