This appeared just to strike her. "It wouldn't be such a base one as you seem to suggest; but, to give you the benefit of the doubt, don't let us admit for a moment that it is the one! By which I mean that we _don't_ separate, inasmuch as for people to do that they must first have come together. For you to decline my condition I must first have imposed it. I mentioned just now," she added for further lucidity, "the fact that makes you such a catch for one's theory, but I didn't mention the other fact, the way you're in spite of everything pledged and committed--which spoils it all. The ideal subject of my experiment," she perfectly allowed, "needn't certainly be that particular rare bird, a young New Yorker who's an ardent student of history. It's over there," she appeared magnanimously to muse, "that history _can_ best be studied!" "How you laugh at me and lash me and rub it in!" Ralph grimly observed. But she put the matter for him now as if in her achieved indulgence of it no misjudgment could interrupt her. "You've earned your holiday, and nothing can be more right and just than for it to be long and unclouded. I know nothing of a finer grace than the way you've gone on year after year doing without it for the charity nearest home; and I'm not so stupid as not to have a notion of the disadvantage at which, in the intellectual work you scraped time for, your limitations and privations must often have placed you. You did it, bravely and patiently, as you could, and I'm sure, ignorant as I am, that no one else could have in the conditions done it half so well. Only the conditions were so wrong that it's delightful they _can_ at last be right. I'll wait for another day," she smiled, "to try my theory." "What you'll wait for," he after a moment returned, "is evidently and more especially another person." She shook her head in general relinquishment. "Another person will never turn up. There will always be a flaw. If he's worth one's idea he'll be sure to have been over. If he hasn't been over he'll be sure not to be worth one's idea. _You_"--oh she could indeed, as he said, rub it in!-- "would have been so perfectly worth it." "Perhaps I might still try to be," he thoughtfully suggested, "if I could by any chance come as near to it as really to understand. But I assure you I don't so much as to take hold of it."