Kingston dropped back into Gundred’s world with a crash. He had been interested and uplifted on the wings of his cousin’s fantasies. He could meet her flying in that empyrean of ideas. He loved the vague, dim regions of her thought. Gundred, without clipping his wings, kept him tethered to her own perch. Happily she clucked and hopped with him in the glittering cage--a hen-soul yoked with a restless hawk’s. Now, out of the free air beyond, had appeared a second hawk, and insensibly Kingston’s wings began to flutter uneasily for a flight. ‘Yes,’ he said rather savagely, answering an unspoken question. ‘No wonder poor Gundred can’t understand such mists and inanities. Have you any idea what you mean, Isabel?’ His irritation was all against Gundred’s inadequacy. It showed her almost in an inferior light. Characteristically, though, he diverted his annoyance to the score of his cousin’s mysticism, and unburdened on her the feelings that his wife had engendered. ‘Idea?’ replied Isabel scornfully. ‘No; why should I? If anyone ever stopped to think what their words really meant, and refused to speak until they had found out, why, no one would ever open their lips again. Man sends the words, and Heaven, we trust, sends the meaning. I have vague notions of a meaning very far away above and beyond all the harassing futilities of language, beyond the domain of grammar and derivations and split infinitives and metaphors and things. But of course one can’t hit it; one can only aim at it. One shoots off into the clouds in the hope of sometimes winging a truth. There’s no use sitting and aiming, aiming, aiming; one has to up with the gun of one’s mind and blaze away. Nine times out of ten one misses dead, but bit by bit one gets practice, just as in earthly shooting, until at last one has attained a good average level of success, though I am afraid till the end of the chapter one only wings Truth, never gets it fair and square in the heart.’ ‘Shall we go in and have tea--yes?’ said Gundred, with gentle dignity, into which was mixed a fine proportion of reproof. She rose and moved towards the door. Isabel looked after her. ‘I have shocked Gundred,’ she said candidly and callously. ‘I suppose I was bound to. She is too fascinating and pretty for words, but I don’t feel, somehow, as if her soul and mine were really cousins. I’m sorry if I have hurt her. It is all my fault. One is such a fool. One gets interested in an idea, and off one goes at score, and nothing else matters in the world but the hunting of it down. You are like that, too, though you are pretending hard not to be. Why do you? Are you trying to match Gundred? You’ll never be able to, you know.’ She looked up at him, laughing. Her face had a radiant, exasperating vitality. In that moment he disliked her more even for what she had than for what she lacked.