Eppie sat before the fire on the low settle, laying down a book as he came in. In her aspect of exquisite worldliness, the white dress displaying her arms and shoulders with fashionable frankness, she struck him anew as being her most perfectly armed and panoplied self. Out on the windy hillside or singing among the woods, nature seemed partially to absorb and possess her, so that she became a part of the winds and woods; but indoors, finished and fine from head to foot, her mastered conventionality made her the more emphatically personal. She embodied civilization in her dress, her smile, her speech, her very being; the loose coils of her hair and the cut of her satin shoe were both significant of choice, of distinctive simplicity; and the very bareness of her shoulders--Gavan gave an amused thought to the ferociously sensitive Tolstoi--symbolized the armor of the world-lover, the world-user. It was she who possessed the charms and weapons of the civilization that crumbled to dust in the hand of the Russian mystic. He could see her confronting the ascetic’s eye with the challenge of her radiant and righteous self-assurance. Her whole aspect rebuilt that shattered world, its pomp and vanity, perhaps, its towering scale of values; each tier narrowing in its elimination of the lower, cruder, less conscious, more usual; each pinnacle a finely fretted flowering of the rare; a dazzling palace of foam. She embodied all that; but, more than all for Gavan, she embodied the deep currents of trust that flowed beneath the foam. Her look welcomed him, though without a smile, as he drew a deep chair to the fire and sat down near her, and for a little while they said nothing, he watching her and she with gravely downcast eyes. “What are you thinking of?” he asked at last. “Of you, of course,” she answered. “About our talk this afternoon; we haven’t finished it yet.” She, too, then, had felt uncertainty that needed relief. “Are you sharpening your knife?” She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I like to you?” “Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.” “No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted your mind; it has been so joyless.” “Does that make it unusual?” “You must love life before you can know it.” “You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.” “Of all mere thought, yes.” She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story; give me yours. Tell me about your life.”