"Oh, that you'll never do. I shall bewilder you to the end. The lady with whom you were so good as to make me acquainted is a beautiful specimen of the English garden-flower, the product of high cultivation and much tending; a tall, delicate stem with the head set upon it in a manner which, as a thing seen and remembered, should doubtless count for us as a gift of the gods. She's the perfect type of the object _raised_ or bred, and everything about her hangs together and conduces to the effect, from the angle of her elbow to the way she drops that vague, conventional, dry little 'Oh!' which dispenses with all further performance. That degree of completeness is always satisfying. But I didn't satisfy her, and she didn't understand me. I don't think they usually understand." "She's no worse than I then." "Ah she didn't try." "No, she doesn't try. But she probably thought you a monster of conceit, and she would think so still more if she were to hear you talk about her trying." "Very likely--very likely," said Gabriel Nash. "I've an idea a good many people think that. It strikes me as comic. I suppose it's a result of my little system." "What little system?" "Oh nothing more wonderful than the idea of being just the same to every one. People have so bemuddled themselves that the last thing they can conceive is that one should be simple." "Lord, do you call yourself simple?" Nick ejaculated. "Absolutely; in the sense of having no interest of my own to push, no nostrum to advertise, no power to conciliate, no axe to grind. I'm not a savage--ah far from it!--but I really think I'm perfectly independent." "Well, that's always provoking!" Nick knowingly returned. "So it would appear, to the great majority of one's fellow-mortals; and I well remember the pang with which I originally made that discovery. It darkened my spirit at a time when I had no thought of evil. What we like, when we're unregenerate, is that a new-comer should give us a password, come over to our side, join our little camp or religion, get into our little boat, in short, whatever it is, and help us to row it. It's natural enough; we're mostly in different tubs and cockles, paddling for life. Our opinions, our convictions and doctrines and standards, are simply the particular thing that will make the boat go--_our boat_, naturally, for they may very often be just the thing that will sink another. If you won't get in people generally hate you." "Your metaphor's very lame," said Nick. "It's the overcrowded boat that goes to the bottom."