Capes made no answer for a time.

“My mind is full of confused stuff,” he said at length.  “I’ve been thinking—­all the afternoon.  Oh, and weeks and months of thought and feeling there are bottled up too....  I feel a mixture of beast and uncle.  I feel like a fraudulent trustee.  Every rule is against me—­Why did I let you begin this?  I might have told—­”

“I don’t see that you could help—­”

“I might have helped—­”

“You couldn’t.”

“I ought to have—­all the same.

“I wonder,” he said, and went off at a tangent.  “You know about my scandalous past?”

“Very little.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  Does it?”

“I think it does.  Profoundly.”

“How?”

“It prevents our marrying.  It forbids—­all sorts of things.”

“It can’t prevent our loving.”

“I’m afraid it can’t.  But, by Jove! it’s going to make our loving a fiercely abstract thing.”

“You are separated from your wife?”

“Yes, but do you know how?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why on earth—?  A man ought to be labelled.  You see, I’m separated from my wife.  But she doesn’t and won’t divorce me.  You don’t understand the fix I am in.  And you don’t know what led to our separation.  And, in fact, all round the problem you don’t know and I don’t see how I could possibly have told you before.  I wanted to, that day in the Zoo.  But I trusted to that ring of yours.”

“Poor old ring!” said Ann Veronica.

“I ought never have gone to the Zoo, I suppose.  I asked you to go.  But a man is a mixed creature....  I wanted the time with you.  I wanted it badly.”

“Tell me about yourself,” said Ann Veronica.

“To begin with, I was—­I was in the divorce court.  I was—­I was a co-respondent.  You understand that term?”

Ann Veronica smiled faintly.  “A modern girl does understand these terms.  She reads novels—­and history—­and all sorts of things.  Did you really doubt if I knew?”

“No.  But I don’t suppose you can understand.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

“To know things by name is one thing; to know them by seeing them and feeling them and being them quite another.  That is where life takes advantage of youth.  You don’t understand.”

“Perhaps I don’t.”

“You don’t.  That’s the difficulty.  If I told you the facts, I expect, since you are in love with me, you’d explain the whole business as being very fine and honorable for me—­the Higher Morality, or something of that sort....  It wasn’t.”

“I don’t deal very much,” said Ann Veronica, “in the Higher Morality, or the Higher Truth, or any of those things.”

“Perhaps you don’t.  But a human being who is young and clean, as you are, is apt to ennoble—­or explain away.”

“I’ve had a biological training.  I’m a hard young woman.”

“Nice clean hardness, anyhow.  I think you are hard.  There’s something—­something adult about you.  I’m talking to you now as though you had all the wisdom and charity in the world.  I’m going to tell you things plainly.  Plainly.  It’s best.  And then you can go home and think things over before we talk again.  I want you to be clear what you’re really and truly up to, anyhow.”