Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/39

 notion of the disadvantage at which, in the intellectual work you scraped time for, your limitations and privations must often have placed you. You did it, bravely and patiently, as you could, and I'm sure, ignorant as I am, that no one else could have in the conditions done it half so well. Only the conditions were so wrong that it's delightful they can at last be right. I'll wait for another day," she smiled, "to try my theory."

"What you'll wait for," he after a moment returned, "is evidently and more especially another person."

She shook her head in general relinquishment. "Another person will never turn up. There will always be a flaw. If he's worth one's idea he'll be sure to have been over. If he hasn't been over he'll be sure not to be worth one's idea. "You"—oh she could indeed, as he said, rub it in!—"would have been so perfectly worth it."

"Perhaps I might still try to be," he thoughtfully suggested, "if I could by any chance come as near to it as really to understand it. But I assure you I don't so much as to take hold of it."

She struck him for a moment as on the point, in answer to this, of breaking into impatience and declaring that his failure of comprehension needn't matter to him. He had a glimpse thus of what he believed—that she truly would have wished him to take her conception on trust, and, as it were, for the love of her; to oblige her by 25