If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as
various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and
horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their
acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation,
they came to know each other. The hours passed quickly, and seemed to
them full to leaking-point. After a night's solitude they were always
ready to begin again.
The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist in free talk
between men and women did in truth exist for both of them, although not
quite in the measure she prescribed. Far more than upon the nature of
sex they dwelt upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk
which had no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright
view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she brought him
such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite the equal
of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her after all,
except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog
in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it would look
in twenty years' time, when the eyes had dulled, and the forehead wore
those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that the middle-aged
are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would the
hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their
life in England.
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