She shrank a little from him. “But,” she asked, “haven’t they always mattered?” “Yes,” he expostulated; “but these Hostels, these Hostels.... We’ve started them—isn’t that good enough? We’ve set them going....” “Do you know,” she asked, “what would happen to the hostels if I were to marry?” “They would go on,” he said. “They would go to a committee. Named. It would include Mrs. Pembrose.... Don’t you see what would happen? He understood the case so well....” Mr. Brumley seemed suddenly shrunken. “He understood too well,” he said. He looked down at her soft eyes, at her drooping gracious form, and it seemed to him that indeed she was made for love and that it was unendurable that she should be content to think of friendship and freedom as the ultimate purposes of her life.... §7 Presently these two were walking in the pine-woods beyond the garden and Mr. Brumley was discoursing lamentably of love, this great glory that was denied them. The shade of perplexity deepened in her dark eyes as she listened. Ever and again she seemed about to speak and then checked herself and let him talk on. He spoke of the closeness of love and the deep excitement of love and how it filled the soul with pride and the world with wonder, and of the universal right of men and women to love. He told of his dreams and his patience, and of the stormy hopes that would not be suppressed when he heard that Sir Isaac was dead. And as he pictured to himself the lost delights at which he hinted, as he called back those covert expectations, he forgot that she had declared herself resolved upon freedom at any cost, and his rage against Sir Isaac, who had possessed and wasted all that he would have cherished so tenderly, grew to nearly uncontrollable proportions. “Here was your life,” he said, “your beautiful life opening and full—full of such dear seeds of delight and wonder, calling for love, ready for love, and there came this _Clutch_, this Clutch that embodied all the narrow meanness of existence, and gripped and crumpled you and spoilt you.... For I tell you my dear you don’t know; you don’t begin to know....” He disregarded her shy eyes, giving way to his gathered wrath. “And he conquers! This little monster of meanness, he conquers to the end—his dead hand, his dead desires, out of the grave they hold you! Always, always, it is Clutch that conquers; the master of life! I was a fool to dream, a fool to hope. I forgot. I thought only of you and I—that perhaps you and I——”