‘You cannot say that you have any religion,’ she said, facing him.  He saw to his astonishment that there had been tears in her eyes.

’You cannot say that I have none.  The radical fault of your uninstructed way of looking at things is that you imagine mankind and the world to be matters of such simple explanation.  You learn by heart a few maxims, half a dozen phrases, and there is your key to every mystery.  That is the child’s state of mind.  You have never studied, you have never thought.  Your self-confidence is ludicrous; you and such as you do not hesitate to judge offhand men who have spent a long life in the passionate pursuit of wisdom.  You have no reverence.  It is the fault you attribute to me, but wrongly; if you had ever brought an open mind to our conversations, you would have understood that my reverence even for your ideal is not a wit less than your own; it is only that I see it in another light.  You say that I have no religion:  what if I have not?  Are one’s final conclusions to be achieved in a year or two of early manhood?  I have my inner voices, and I try to understand them.  Often enough they are ambiguous, contradictory; I live in hope that their bidding will become clearer.  I search for meanings, try to understand myself, strive after knowledge.’

’You might as well have been born a pagan.  One voice has spoken; its bidding is the sufficient and only guide.’

’Say rather that so it seems to you.  Your inheritance of conviction is not mine; your mode of reasoning and my own have nothing in common.  We inhabit different worlds.’

Beatrice let her eyes turn slowly to his face.  The smile with which he met her found no reflection on her countenance; her look was that of one who realises a fatality.

‘Shall we join them?’ she asked in a moment, nodding towards the far-off carriage which was about to hide itself among trees.

Wilfrid mused instead of answering.  She began to ride on.

‘Stay one minute,’ he said.  ’I have been anything but courteous in my way of speaking to you, but it was better to put off idle forms, was it not ?’

‘Yes; I shall know henceforth what you think of me.’

‘Not from this one conversation, if you mean that.’

‘Well, it does not matter.’

’Perhaps not.  Difference of opinion has fortunately little to do with old-standing kindness.’

’I am not sure that you are right, at all events when it has expressed itself in words of contempt.’

It was not resentment that her voice conveyed, but some thing which Wilfrid found it harder to bear.  Her drooped eyelids and subdued tone indicated a humble pride, which the protest of her beauty made pathetic.

‘We will never speak of such things again,’ he said gently.  ’Let me have your forgiveness.  When we join them down there, they will laugh at us and say we have been quarrelling as usual; in future I think we mustn’t quarrel, we are both of us getting too old for the amusement.  When you sing to us to-night, I shall remember how foolish I was even to pretend contempt.’