"It's because I want to know all sorts of people." Something in
Selwyn's face stopped me, and, getting up from the sofa, I went over
to the window and raised it slightly. My heart was pounding. I
could laugh away the questions of others and ignore their comments,
but with Selwyn this would be impossible. An overwhelming sense of
distance and separation came over me demoralizingly as I pretended to
rearrange the curtain, and for a moment words would not come.

I knew, of course, that Selwyn had neither patience nor sympathy with
my desire to know more of life than I could learn in the particular
world into which I had been born, but the keener realization to-night
made between us a wide and separating gulf, and I felt suddenly alone
and uncertain, and dispirited and afraid.

In our love of books, of digging deep into certain subjects, of
historic questing and speculative discussions we are closely
sympathetic, but in many viewpoints we are as apart as the poles.
Perhaps we will always be.

Selwyn by heritage and training and natural inclination is
conventional and conservative. I am not. To walk in beaten tracks
is not easy for me. I want to explore for myself. He thinks a woman
has no business in by-paths. Our opposing beliefs do not make for
placid friendship.

It is Selwyn's indifference to life, to its problems and struggles
and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond
restraint. In his profession he is successful. His ambition makes
him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human