"Oh yes--I like him."

"That's all right. And really, I don't wonder that people can't make him
out. He's the strangest animal _I_ ever met in my life. I haven't made
him out yet. I think I shall give him up."

"Give him up, by all means. Isn't that what people generally do when they
can't understand each other?"

Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking
came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and
probing into a man's past--"

Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was
sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to
have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some
familiar spirit. "And yet I wish--no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must
have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on
Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had
never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you
think of that? Must you be one or the other?"

Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us
sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."

"I wonder. He isn't a fool."