"Yes," answered the professor, just as slowly, "it would take a woman. And there are circumstances under which it would be better for the woman if she let what she might rouse lie and sleep." "For instance?" said Tredennis, with a fierce leap of every pulse in his body. "If," said the professor, deliberately,--"if she were not free to give what his feeling for her demanded." He paused to turn Tredennis round. "Confound him!" he said, with a curiously irritable seriousness. "If he once reached a white heat,--that fellow with his objectless follies, and his dress-coat, and his white necktie, and his opera hat under his arm,--if he once forgot them and himself, it would be her fate to remember him as long as her life should last." "_Her_ fate?" said Tredennis. "I said it would have to be a woman," said the professor. "I should not like it to be a woman I felt an interest in. We have reached the end of the block. Let us walk back again." When he spoke again it was of Richard Armory, not of Arbuthnot. "You went upstairs into the Museum, as Bertha calls it?" he said. "Yes," answered Tredennis; "and into the workroom." "And saw the models, and the collections, and the books?" "Yes." "He has a good many enthusiasms, Richard," said the professor. "They might form a collection of themselves. He won't tire of life easily. He is a fine contrast to--the other." They were nearing the house again by this time, and he glanced up at its front. "There is a light in the nursery window," he said. "It must be one of Janey's restless nights." "Yes," said Tredennis. "Mrs. Amory was with her when we came downstairs, and she told us that the child was nervous and needed her." "She has wonderful patience with them," said the professor, "and a sort of genius for understanding their vague young needs and desires. She never does them an injustice for want of thought, and never fails them. I have seen her spend half an hour half-kneeling, half-sitting on the nursery floor, by one of them, with her arm round it, questioning it, and helping it to tell its own story, in a way that was very motherly. There is a great deal of the maternal instinct in her." Tredennis made no reply, but there rose before his mental vision the picture before the nursery fire, and he saw again the soft, close clasp of the fair hand and arm. "It's curious how seldom we speak of paternal instinct," the professor went on. "It is always maternal instinct. Well, it is a great thing. And it is a great safeguard where--where life is not satisfactory. And as one grows older one sees a good deal of that. It is pitiful sometimes, when one finds it, as one so often does, in young things who haven't got over their desperate mental insistence on their right to be happy." He checked himself with a faint laugh.