We went back to his room, Mrs. Severn and I, and sat by the fire. She
brought the cat with her, and all the while we were talking it sat on
her knee and purred contentedly. After I had offered her a cigarette and
lit it for her, she asked suddenly: "Do you think you understand him?"
"I certainly don't think I do," I answered. "But I've been wondering all
the time if _you_ did."
"Why _me_?"
"Because he tells you more in five minutes than he'd tell me in five
years."
She half smiled. "That's true. In some ways I can twist him round my
little finger.... But in other ways he's just rock--solid rock--don't
you feel that?" She caressed the cat and went on: "I'm not a
sentimentalist. I don't believe it's a sin to experiment on animals if
by doing so you have a chance of benefiting human lives, and I'm not so
absurd as to believe that vivisectors are all sadists. So it isn't
anything to do with _that_.... But, all the same, I feel that he's not
human. I don't mean that he's _in_human. I mean that he's just
_un_human--the humanity in him hasn't ever yet been stirred. He just
lives for that high ideal--at two hundred a year. It's splendid, I know,
but from a woman's point of view, at any rate, it's just a shade
unsatisfactory."
"I don't suppose he ever considers the woman's point of view."
"Of course he doesn't. That's part of the trouble. He's got his eyes
fixed on this distant goal and he doesn't see the other things nearer
his eyes. He doesn't see that if a man's going to be a success in this
world he's got to make friends and go about and not be satisfied with
two hundred pounds a year." (The money seemed to obsess her.)
"He'd tell you he didn't want to be that sort of success."
"But he _must_ be, if he's going to be any other sort of success in
addition. Even the medieval saints, who made a virtue of poverty, used
to make an advertisement of it as well. He doesn't do even that. Of
course I don't say he need be an absolutely worldly success like
Geoffrey. He couldn't be if he tried, I'm sure. But I think he might
compromise."