"It seems to me you never wander." "Because I know that, if I did, I should probably never come back to the road. What you perhaps consider my strength takes its rise, I believe, in my knowledge of my weakness. Things that are right for others aren't right for me." No one was near them. The music seemed to have abolished for the moment the difference in age between them. Claude spoke to her as he had seldom spoken to her before, with an almost complete unreserve of manner. "Do you know why some men enter the cloister?" he continued. "It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines. Mullion House is my cloister. I haven't got the power of apportioning my life with sweet reason, so much work, so much play, so much retirement, so much society, so much restraint, so much license. I could never pursue my art through wildness, as so many men have done, women too. I don't believe I could even stick to it in the midst of the ordinary life of pleasures and distractions. It's like a bone that I have to seize and take away into a cave where no one can see me gnaw it. Isn't that a beastly simile?" "Is that why you won't go to Max Elliot's, that you refused Mrs. Shiffney? Do you think that the sort of thing which inspires many men--the audience, let us say, watching the combat--would unnerve you?" "I don't say that. But I think it might lead me into wild extravagance, or into complete idleness. And I think, I know, that I might be tempted irresistibly to give an audience what it wanted. There's something in me which is ready to rush out to satisfy expectation. I hate it, but it's there." "And yet you're so uncompromising." "That's my armor. I daren't wear ordinary clothes, lest every arrow should pierce me." A bell sounded. They returned to the concert room. When the second part was over Heath looked at Mrs. Mansfield and said: "Where are we going?" They were in the midst of the crowd passing out. Women were winding soft things about their necks, men were buttoning up their coats. For a March wind was about in the great city. She returned his look and smiled. "Ah! You guessed! It's the gallery, I suppose. I'm not accustomed to all this fun. Isn't it amazing what a groove one lives in? Berkeley Square shadows the whole of my life I begin to believe." "Don't say the motor is waiting!" "No, it isn't." "Shall we go to some preposterous place--to the Monico?" "Where you like. It's just tea time, or coffee time." They walked to the Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, passing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating airily on the top.