Miss Lamb paused, and, turning her eyes to Craik with a look full of reproach, she said: "Ah! you are like the others, you don't think I am serious; you think I would not understand it!" "Oh no, not that!" Craik urged in quick distress. "You would understand it, of course, what there is to understand. I only meant," he stammered, "I only meant that it was not well written, not interesting--not really worth reading, I mean." "Oh, I'm sure it is worth reading, and I hear it's so clever. It is about Asia Minor, isn't it. Asia Minor is so interesting; I wish you would tell me something about it, and about your work. Do you like it here? Of course you do. Have you been in Oxford long?" For a third time they passed round the cloister square, loitering with slow footsteps, through the old arches and past the epitaphs of the ancient celibate Fellows, and Craik, talking with an unreserve that was intimate and sudden, and yet somehow seemed quite natural to him, told about his work, and the writing of his book. Then, in answer to a question of Miss Lamb's, he described his quiet bringing up in an obsolete old town where his parents were tradespeople; his early schooling, how he had come to Oxford on a scholarship, and how he had stayed there ever since, living in the same College, his parents having died, and the Logic tutorship being offered to him just when he had taken his degree. So he seemed to have lived a long while there, in that sleepy old College, within its high walls and buildings: as an undergraduate first, busy and almost solitary, save for a few friends similar to himself; then as a tutor, still more busy with his work, and still more solitary; and above all, during the last few years, when all his thought and leisure had been given to his book on Ionic philosophers. How many years was it altogether? Eight; no, ten. And then, as she seemed to be really interested, he gave a sketch, half humorous and half serious, of his life in College, his amusements, his walks with Ranken. A bare, monastic life it seemed to himself when he came to describe it. So little to tell of in so many years; and how long ago it seemed! "But dear me!" Craik exclaimed at last, with a blush, "I don't think I have ever talked so much of myself before. It sounds rather dull, I'm afraid." Miss Lamb stopped for a moment. "Dull, Mr. Craik," she cried, "oh no, I think it is noble! To have achieved so much already. You don't know how I have been interested! Only it is so--I mean it makes me seem so--so--. I suppose you hate women." "Oh no--_no_!" "I mean look down on them, despise them." "No! why I--" "I'm afraid you really do, only you're too polite to say so. You don't think, do you, that they could understand philosophy?" "Of course they could, quite as well as we do, if they would only try."