She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her to take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of beauty, although she mentioned herself that he took it with a difference, a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of not having yet quite sounded.  The depths of his faith, of course—­there she could only scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her.  The atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world, and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel for Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment.  He warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and she was not, on the whole, the poorer by any exchange they made, but she was sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour of adventure.  She found herself inclined—­and the experience was new—­to make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious, concentrated quality and a strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches.  There was also the impression—­was it too fantastic—­of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way.  Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to one’s idea.  But the comparison was subtly irritating, and after a time she turned from it.  She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold’s sex than she would have thought it possible to be—­one hardly paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff.  With regard to Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she was less oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own.  Perhaps it is already evident that this was her grievance with life, when the joy of if left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her personal curves, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of her and found her willing to perform:  the fact that it meant more to her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except the biological.  She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions—­her experience had not been upon that plan—­but she bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all-pervading; one came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains.  It was absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and womankind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected to