half amused and half annoyed. "I am in earnest," said Claudius,
plucking a blade of grass and twisting it round his finger.

"Truly?" asked she.

"Foi de gentilhomme!" he answered.

"But Mr. Barker told me you lived like a hermit."

"That is the reason it has been a dream," said he.

"You have not told me what the dream was like. What beautiful things
have you fancied about us?"

"I have dreamed of woman's mission, and of woman's love. I have fancied
that woman and woman's love represented the ruling spirit, as man and
man's brain represent the moving agent, in the world. I have drawn
pictures of an age in which real chivalry of word and thought and deed
might be the only law necessary to control men's actions. Not the scenic
and theatrical chivalry of the middle age, ready at any moment to break
out into epidemic crime, but a true reverence and understanding of
woman's supreme right to honour and consideration; an age wherein it
should be no longer coarsely said that love is but an episode in the
brutal life of man, while to woman it is life itself. I have dreamed
that the eternal womanhood of the universe beckoned me to follow."

The Countess could not take her eyes off Claudius. She had never met a
man like him; at least she had never met a man who plunged into this
kind of talk after half an hour's acquaintance. There was a thrill of
feeling in her smooth deep voice when she answered: "If all men thought