“Dont you think we had better not begin that.  I generally repeat my conversations to Ned.  Not that he will mind, if you dont.”

Douglas now felt at his ease and in his clement.  He was clearly welcome to philander.  Recovering his poise at once, he began, in his finest voice, “You need not chide me.  There can be no mistake on my part now.  You can entangle me without fear; and I can love without hope.  Ned is an unrepealed statute of Forbiddance.  Go on, Mrs. Conolly.  Play with me:  it will amuse you.  And—­spiritless wretch that I am!—­it will help me to live until you throw me away, crushed again.”

“You seem to have been quite comfortable without me:  at least you look extremely well.  I suspect you are becoming a little lazy and attached to your dinner.  Your old haughtiness seems to have faded into a mere habit.  It used to be the most active principle in you.  Are you quite sure that nobody else has been helping you to live, as you call it?”

“Helping me to forget, you mean.  No, not one.  Time has taught me the way to vegetate; and so I no longer need to live.  As you have remarked, I have habits, not active principles.  But one at least of these principles is blossoming again even as I speak.  If I could only live as that lily lives now!”

“In a warm bath?”

“No.  Floating on the surface of a quiet pool, looking up into your eyes, with no memory for the past, no anticipation of the future.”

“Delightful! especially for me.  I think we had better go and look for Ned.”

“Were I in his place I would not be absent from your side now—­or ever.”

“That is to say, if you were in his place, you wouldnt be in his place—­among the gum trees.  Perhaps you would be right.”

“He is the only man I have ever stooped to envy.”

“You have reason to,” said Marian, suddenly grave.

“I envy him sometimes myself.  What would you give to be never without a purpose, never with a regret, to regard life as a succession of objects each to be accomplished by so many days’ work; to take your pleasure in trifling lazily with the consciousness of possessing a strong brain; to study love, family affection, and friendship as a doctor studies breathing or digestion; to look on disinterestedness as either weakness or hypocrisy, and on death as a mere transfer of your social function to some member of the next generation?”

“I could achieve all that, if I would, at the cost of my soul.  I would not for worlds be such a man, save on one condition.”

“To wit?”

“That only as such could I win the woman I loved.”

“Oh, you would not think so much of an insignificant factor like love if you were Ned.”

“May I ask, do you, too, think of love as ’an insignificant factor’?”

“I?  Oh, I am not a sociologist.  Besides, I have never been in love.”

“What!  You have never been in love?”