Gradually Boase drew what little story there was to tell from her, but more than she told him he gathered for himself, from his watching of her and his knowledge of Killigrew.  He was an old man now and a wise one.  The priest in him yearned over her to wean her from her sin, but the patient wisdom in him told him that not that way had she yet come.  He talked quietly to her, soothing her by his calmness, his lack of reproaches or adjurations, and presently she was sitting forward in the pew in the gathering dusk talking more normally.

“There are some sheep who are not only not of this fold,” he said at last, “but who seem as though they never could be on this side of the grave.  Joe has the odd quality of never having felt spiritual want, and probably he never will.”

“It is that uncertainty of edge about him that has always been the difficulty,” she said.  “That—­oh, it’s so difficult to explain.  I mean, he has never seemed to realise the limits of individuality.  Woman is woman to him—­not one woman.  He’s often said that the affinity made-for-each-other theory must be pure nonsense; that you meet during your little life hundreds of people who all have more or less of an affinity for you—­some more, some less—­and that it’s practically your duty to fuse that alikeness wherever you meet it.  Of course he agrees that among the lot there’s bound to be one with whom the overlap is bigger than it is with any of the others, but then he looks on that as no reason for thinking that person is the one person for you.  There are probably several more people knocking round with whom your overlap would be still wider, only you never happen to meet them.  And to bind yourself irrevocably to one would be to prevent your fusing with them if you did meet them.  It works out at this—­that the greatest giving and the greatest taking is the ideal state of affairs.  Give to everyone you meet and take all you can from them.  But, you see, my trouble is I have nothing left to give anyone but him.  I’ve always given him everything—­I want no one and nothing else.  And he’s wanted so many and so much.  I see the logic and admirable sense of his attitude so clearly that even while a primitive root jealousy is eating me up I am so infected by his theory that I don’t blame him.  I feel myself nebulous as regards him, as blurred at edge as he is.”

“Oh, my dear child!” said Boase, “this—­this in a way bigness of his view just makes him more of an individualist than anyone.  He limits himself nowhere, but simply because it’s all gain to his individuality.  That it is gain to others too is neither here nor there.”

“It can be loss to the others; there is such a thing as all taking and no giving.”

“Ah, now you’re looking on it from the point of view of payment!  Take for a moment the truer view that sorrow is as much gain as pleasure.  The only gain on earth is experience, and both emotions go to feed that.”