"One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do
rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one
can find a _modus vivendi."_
"Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?"_
He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the
mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. "You
do understand, don't you? You see how the very thought of the thing
humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be--don't let
us look any farther than that!" She caught his hands. "_Promise_ me you'll
never speak of it again; promise me you'll never _think_ of it even," she
implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.
Through what followed--his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced
submission to her wishes--she had a sense of his but half-discerning all
that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that
memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man
seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his
intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in
quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have
detected any over-readiness to understand her.
II
When the train at night-fall brought them to their journey's end at the
edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to
pass from one solitude to another.
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