“Yes, and I’ll tell you why, if you’ll promise not to be offended.”

“Please—­please do.”

“I think one reads character as much with the eyes of the heart as with the eyes of the brain.  You use two pairs of eyes in your reading.  But I am not sure that Doctor Isaacson does.”

“Why did you ask me not to be offended?  You meant to put it differently.  And you would have been right.  Isaacson is a brilliant man, and I am not.  But he has as much heart as I, although he has so much more brain than I. And the stronger each is, the better for a man.”

“But the brain—­oh, it has such a tendency to overshadow, to browbeat the heart.  In its strength it so often grows arrogant.  The juste milieu—­I think you have it.  Be content, and never let your brain cry out for more, lest your heart should have to put up with less.”

“You think too well of me,” he said; “much too well.”

She leaned forward over the tea-table and looked at him closely, with the peculiar scrutiny of one so strongly concentrated upon the matter in hand as to be absolutely unself-conscious.

“I wonder if I do,” she said; and he felt as if she were trying to drag the very heart out of him and to see how it was beating.  “I wonder if I do.”

She relaxed her muscles, which had been tense, and leaned back, letting her right hand, which for a moment had grasped the edge of the table, drop down on to her lap.

“It may be so.  I do think well of you.  That is certain.  And I’m afraid I think very often badly of men.  And yet I do try to judge fairly, and not only to put on the black cap because of my own unfortunate experiences.  There are such splendid men—­but there are such utter brutes.  You must know that.  And yet I doubt if a man ever knows how good, or how bad, another man can be.  Perhaps one must be a woman thoroughly to know a man—­man, the beast and the angel.”

“I dare say that is true.”

He spoke almost with conviction.  For all the time he had been with her he had been companioned by a strange, unusual feeling of being understood, of having the better part of him rightly appraised, and even too greatly appreciated.  And this feeling had warmed his mind and heart almost as a generous wine warms the body.

“I’m sure it is true.”

He put down his cup.  Suddenly there had come to him the desire to go away, to be alone.  He saw the curtains moving gently by the windows, and heard the distant, softened sound of the voices and the traffic of the city.  And he thought of the river, and the sunset, and the barges swinging on the hurrying tide, and of the multitudes of eddies in the water.  Like those eddies were the thoughts within his mind, the feelings within his heart.  Were they not being driven onwards by the current of time, onwards towards the spacious sea of action?  Abruptly his heart was invaded by a longing for largeness, a longing that was essential in his nature, but that