"Live up to them," she returned as if she had not heard him. "You won't do anything else." She said it with a shortness that was almost stern, and he felt, detestably, as if she had but one moment instructed and at the other derided him. "Isn't that moreover quite the lesson of the chance, the one you just mentioned, of what you may come in for? Isn't an old property for you the very finger of fortune, the very 'lead' of providence? Profit for heaven's sake by your old property. It will open your eyes." She went on with widened looks which so further ennobled her face that they held him by themselves, standing out as he did from any truth in them. "That's what your little book itself says--your little book that's so wonderful for a man uninitiated; by which I venture to mean, you see, a man untravelled. It's apropos of what you call the 'backward vision,' and I could immediately find the page. 'There are particular places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that seem to put us into communication, and the spell is sometimes made to work by the imposition of hands, if it be patient enough, on an old object or an old surface.' It's very wonderful, you know, your having arrived at that, your having guessed it, in _this_ place, which denies the old at every turn and contains so few such objects or surfaces." So she continued to comment. "I hope your old house will contain plenty of them." Her quotation of this twaddle, as it struck him, from his small uninformed Essay, for which he now blushed, completed his disarray. Half a dozen things rose to his lips and stopped, but the bitterest got uttered. "What's most extraordinary is that illusion I was under about your own type. I had taken it," he explained, "as so beautifully suggestive." "Suggestive of what?" his hostess asked. He looked at her without meeting this and as for the last time. "And again it's all there. You would help me more than anyone. I feel it," he continued with his eyes on her face, "really _not_ as a mistake. Essentially--well, you're one of them." "One of whom?" "The women. _The_ women. Good-bye," he said again and offering his hand as if their queer chasm had been bridged by this intensity of the personal question. It was as if he took something that she couldn't help giving, and what he took made him after an instant break out: "It will be you--I'll be hanged!--who will come." But she was so firm and finished and high withal that even the ring of perception in this, or at least the rush of confidence, failed to make her wince. It only made her think to the very end of her goodnature. "I'll tell you what I'll do--if I can trust to your honour." "You can trust to my honour," Pendrel said. "Very well then, I promise you that if I find I want to--for that's the point--I'll loyally, bravely, and at whatever cost this time to my vanity, go back."