What Charmides had told me filled me with great astonishment; it seemed to me strange that I had not perceived the truth before.  It made me feel that I had somehow been wasting time.  I was tempted to call Amroth to my side, but I remembered what he had said, and I determined to resist the impulse.  I half expected to find that our strange talk, and the very obvious disapproval of our words, had made some difference to me.  But it was not the case.  I found myself treated with the same smiling welcome as before, and indeed with an added kind of gentleness, such as older people give to a child who has been confronted with some hard fact of life, such as a sorrow or an illness.  This in a way disconcerted me; for in the moment when I had perceived the truth, there had come over me the feeling that I ought in some way to bestir myself to preach, to warn, to advise.  But the idea of finding any sort of fault with these contented, leisurely, interested people, seemed to me absurd, and so I continued as before, half enjoying the life about me, and half bored by it.  It seemed so ludicrous in any way to pity the inhabitants of the place, and yet I dimly saw that none of them could possibly continue there.  But I soon saw that there was no question of advice, because I had nothing to advise.  To ask them to be discontented, to suffer, to inquire, seemed as absurd as to ask a man riding comfortably in a carriage to get out and walk; and yet I felt that it was just that which they needed.  But one effect the incident had; it somehow seemed to draw me more to Cynthia.  There followed a time of very close companionship with her.  She sought me out, she began to confide in me, chattering about her happiness and her delight in her surroundings, as a child might chatter, and half chiding me, in a tender and pretty way, for not being more at ease in the place.  “You always seem to me,” she said, “as if you were only staying here, while I feel as if I could live here for ever.  Of course you are very kind and patient about it all, but you are not at home—­and I don’t care a bit about your disapproval now.”  She talked to me much about Lucius, who seemed to have a great attraction for her.  “He is all right,” she said.  “There is no nonsense about him,—­we understand each other; I don’t get tired of him, and we like the same things.  I seem to know exactly what he feels about everything; and that is one of the comforts of this place, that no one asks questions or makes mischief; one can do just as one likes all the time.  I did not think, when I was alive, that there could be anything so delightful as all this ahead of me.”

“Do you never think—?” I began, but she put her hand to my lips, like a child, to stop me, and said, “No, I never think, and I never mean to think, of all the old hateful things.  I never wilfully did any harm; I only liked the people who liked me, and gave them all they asked—­and now I know that I did right, though in old days serious people used to try to frighten me.  God is very good to me,” she went on, smiling, “to allow me to be happy in my own way.”