His candour pleased her. ‘Control?’ she said. ‘Our feelings control _us_, if they are real feelings. The only real feelings are those that are uncontrollable.’ ‘I am the son of many generations of unreal feelings then. There are no love stories in my quiet family--at least, only one, and that was a mad freak.’ ‘There are no others in mine,’ said Isabel, ‘except hate stories, perhaps. And I suppose they are the same thing, only turned wrong way out.’ ‘I believe that real love is quite calm and level, you know,’ explained Kingston. ‘Your great blazing stories are built of passion, not of love. A big love is very quiet, and goes on peacefully from day to day, almost monotonous in its imperceptible development.’ ‘It sounds too like the kingdom of heaven to be very satisfactory on earth,’ said Isabel. ‘Anyhow,’ replied Kingston, hotly defending what nobody had attacked; ‘I say that the happy concert of lives and marriages--ideal lives and marriages--is based on tranquil harmonies, not on melodramatic chords.’ Isabel smiled quietly. ‘Why are we talking about love?’ she asked. ‘It was friendship we were settling on.’ He made no reply, and they entered the Castle. CHAPTER IX The friendship between Kingston and Isabel did not progress apace. Its development was jerky, uneven, unsatisfactory. Kingston was at once restrained and spurred on by resentment. He resented the fact of the friendship, was perpetually reluctant, suspicious, filled with a strange, alert uneasiness. Isabel, for her part, found the relation less careless and smooth than her friendships usually were. It brought an usually poignant satisfaction, and, in revenge, an unusually poignant feeling of strain and annoyance at Kingston’s refusal to meet her half-way. Normally she should not have cared a straw--by all her rules she did not care a straw--yet, none the less, the guarded hostility with which he met her advances stimulated and exasperated her to the point of defiance.