"You talk like Karl Westguard," she said, laughing. "Anyway, what has all this to do with you and Strelsa Leeds?" "Nothing." He shrugged. "She is part of your last word in social civilisation----" "She is a very normal, sensitive, proud girl, who has known little except unhappiness all her life, Rix--including two years of marital misery--two years of horror.--And you forget that those two years were the result of a demand purely and brutally emotional--to which, a novice, utterly ignorant, she yielded--pushed on by her mother.... Please be fair to her; remember that her childhood was pinched with poverty, that her girlhood in school was a lonely one, embarrassed by lack of everything which her fashionable schoolmates had as matters of course. "She could not go to the homes of her schoolmates in vacation times, because she could not ask them, in turn, to her own. She was still in school when Reggie Leeds saw her--and misbehaved--and the poor little thing was sent home, guiltless but already half-damned. No wonder her mother chased Reggie Leeds half around the world dragging her daughter by the wrist!" "Did it make matters any better to force that drunken cad into a marriage?" asked Quarren coldly. "It makes another marriage possible for Strelsa." Quarren gazed out across the country where a fine misty rain was still falling. Acres of clover stretched away silvered with powdery moisture; robins and bluebirds covered the soaked lawns, and their excited call-notes prophesied blue skies. "It doesn't make any difference one way or the other," said Quarren, half to himself. "She will go on in the predestined orbit----" "Not if a stronger body pulls her out of it." "There is nothing to which she responds--except what I have not." "Make what you do possess more powerful, then." "What do I possess?" "Kindness. And also manhood, Ricky. Don't you?" "Perhaps so--now--after a fashion.... But I am not the man who could ever attract her----" "Wake her, and find out." "Wake her?" "Didn't I tell you that many of us are asleep, and that few of us awake easily? Didn't I tell you that nobody likes to be awakened from the warm comfort and idle security of emotionless slumber?--that it is the instinct of many of us to resist--just as I hear my maid speak to me in the morning and then turn over for another forty winks, hating her!" They both laughed. "My maid has instructions to persist until I respond," said Molly. "Those are my instructions to you, also." "Suppose, after all, I were knocking at the door of an empty room?" "You must take your chances of course." There was a noise of horses on the gravel: Langly cantered up on a handsome hunter followed by a mounted groom leading Strelsa's mare. Sprowl dismounted and came up to pay his respects to Molly, scarcely troubling himself to recognise Quarren's presence, and turning his back to him immediately, although Molly twice attempted to include him in the conversation.