“Reading them?” she said, in answer to my query.  “Of course I’m reading them.  I want to know what these clever people are thinking, even if I don’t always agree with them, and you ought to read them too.  It’s quite true what foreigners say about our men,—­that they live in a groove, that they haven’t any range of conversation.”

“I’m quite willing to be educated,” I replied.  “I haven’t a doubt that I need it.”

She was leaning back in her chair, her hands behind her head, a posture she often assumed.  She looked up at me amusedly.

“I’ll acknowledge that you’re more teachable than most of them,” she said.  “Do you know, Hugh, sometimes you puzzle me greatly.  When you are here and we’re talking together I can never think of you as you are out in the world, fighting for power—­and getting it.  I suppose it’s part of your charm, that there is that side of you, but I never consciously realize it.  You’re what they call a dual personality.”

“That’s a pretty hard name!” I exclaimed.

She laughed.

“I can’t help it—­you are.  Oh, not disagreeably so, quite normally—­that’s the odd thing about you.  Sometimes I believe that you were made for something different, that in spite of your success you have missed your ‘metier.’”

“What ought I to have been?”

“How can I tell?  A Goethe, perhaps—­a Goethe smothered by a twentieth-century environment.  Your love of adventure isn’t dead, it’s been merely misdirected, real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying into unknown paths.  Perhaps you haven’t yet found yourself.”

“How uncanny!” I said, stirred and startled.

“You have a taste for literature, you know, though you’ve buried it.  Give me Turgeniev.  We’ll begin with him....”

Her reading and the talks that followed it were exciting, amazingly stimulating....  Once Nancy gave me an amusing account of a debate which had taken place in the newly organized woman’s discussion club to which she belonged over a rather daring book by an English novelist.  Mrs. Dickinson had revolted.

“No, she wasn’t really shocked, not in the way she thought she was,” said Nancy, in answer to a query of mine.

“How was she shocked, then?”

“As you and I are shocked.”

“But I’m not shocked,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, you are, and so am I—­not on the moral side, nor is it the moral aspect that troubles Lula Dickinson.  She thinks it’s the moral aspect, but it’s really the revolutionary aspect, the menace to those precious institutions from which we derive our privileges and comforts.”

I considered this, and laughed.

“What’s the use of being a humbug about it,” said Nancy.

“But you’re talking like a revolutionary,” I said.

“I may be talking like one, but I’m not one.  I once had the makings of one—­of a good one,—­a ‘proper’ one, as the English would say.”  She sighed.