That afternoon Ernie and his father sauntered up to the chalk-pit, and lay on the green hill-side above it in the sun. Ernie plucked the bents and chewed them. "Dad," he began at last. "Yes." "What is love?" Once years ago at a dance in Grosvenor Square, Edward Caspar had himself for a moment floated out on to the ocean of an immense and wonderful new life. Thereafter he had been captured, as such easy-going dreamy creatures are, by one of the fiercer sex. He respected his wife, admired her beauty, owed her much, and was aware of it; but for all her strength of character Anne had found herself from the start of her married relations with her husband in that position of secret moral inferiority which is even to-day, perhaps as the result of an age-long inheritance of tradition, the accustomed doom of the woman who has taken the initiative in matters of sex. Moreover as the years went by the doom grew always more oppressive, and her husband more remote.... Edward answered his son, "A door opens," he said slowly. "And you see." "What d'you see?" persisted the young man. His father made a curious undulating motion with his hand. "_The Infinite that lends A Yonder to all ends,_" he said after a pause, and gestured across the Weald stretched beneath them. "I can see it," he mused, "and hear it. So can you. It's a Tide--like the wind in willow leaves. It's silvery and it rustles. It's there--and here--and everywhere. The scientists call it ether. So it is--from their point of view. If you approach it from the other side--our side--it's what you said. It goes like so--like a billow." With fine long-fingered hand he resumed that curious rhythmic motion of his. "I once heard somebody compare Humanity to an Undulating Wave. So it is, because it's the highest expression of _That_. It made us, and is us. All that about the Everlasting Arms which Mr. Pigott, and the Archdeacon, and your Salvation Joe talk about, it's all true--literally true. Only they put it crudely; and for most of them it's an opinion and not a fact of experience--that a man can prove for himself at any moment." He paused. "Love is Recognition--often instantaneous. It is the I-within recognizes the Me-without." He was sitting up now, bare-headed. A lovely colour flushed his frail complexion. To Ernie, watching his scant hair, he seemed wonderfully innocent and pure: a child talking with the wisdom of an old man. Then his father spoke again with an emphasis that was almost startling.