She smiled in her implacable splendour at his touching want of grasp. "Isn't the whole point that you can't _possibly_ go for a few months? It would be a shame moreover if you did. I had quite as soon you went for a lifetime as for three days. I want you perfect, and three hours would prevent it. When I say 'I want' you," she handsomely developed, "I only mean I should want you if I had a right. My insanity, I quite understand, deprives me of all rights. But at the same time," she insisted, "you don't in the least undermine it by calling it a cold little theory. I don't pretend that it's anything else: my cold little theory is exactly indeed that it would be interesting to catch you--catch you young, as they say, since you _are_ young--and put you through." He followed her with his face of gloom. "For the amusement of seeing what I should be at fifty?" "There you are"--it had made her again quick; "and see what it is to be really intelligent! Precisely for the amusement, if you prefer that word--though I should use some other: save for the high idea, the intense interest, the peculiar beauty. I should see," said Mrs. Coyne, "what it makes of a man." "You would indeed!" her visitor brooded. She laughed out at his tone. "Ah but don't put it as a threat--as if you'd be Nick o' the Woods, and, to punish me for what I should have kept you from, wish to beat out my brains. You'd really be as pleased with me, I feel sure, as I should with you, and we'd grow old together in honour and patriotism." She became, however, the next moment braver; which had the effect of showing her as kinder. "It's all, when one considers, the fault of your peculiar situation--added, I mean, to the turn of your mind. The result of the combination of your starved state (which I call, you see, to oblige you, what you would call it) and your natural passion for everything old is as calculable as to-morrow's dawn," It was the sort of fact one could put in a nutshell. "The only way for you not to remain is not to go." "You'll see whether I remain," Ralph said as drily as he could. "Oh but do! Do," she earnestly repeated. "The great thing is after all not to spoil it--whichever way you take it; and isn't it also, when one thinks, much better you should be perfect for yourself than for me?" "How you must, fortunately, hate and loathe me!"--Ralph returned to that with the same mastered misery. "Because if it weren't for that what a question for us to separate on!"