Irene admitted. “Yes, of course I like him. But not ... not in any special way. I’d really not thought of him like that.” A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more happy. Love—it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people’s love as in her own. She wanted every one to love, constantly and complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist—when it happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did not—at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth.... One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection, kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old, paralytic love and turns whole-heartedly to the young passion. “What a goose you are!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on, “whether you’re capable of being in love at all, you’re so uncomprehending, so cold.” Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s company without regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be accused of being a murderess—particularly if it were a case of _crime passionel_. “I don’t know how you say that,” she said indignantly. “I’m always in love.” Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario? “You may think you have,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love. “But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born like that.” She shook her head. “And they die like that.” One might have inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s words and the tone of her voice that Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything remotely resembling an amorous passion. Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt’s hair. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness. Something spectacular.