"That isn't quite fair, Nancy."
"What are you working for?" she suddenly inquired, straightening up.
"What any man works for, I suppose."
"Ah, there you have hit it,--what any man works for in our world.
Power,--personal power. You want to be somebody,--isn't that it? Not the
noblest ambition, you'll have to admit,--not the kind of thing we used to
dream about, when we did dream. Well, when we find we can't realize our
dreams, we take the next best thing. And I fail to see why you should
blame me for taking it when you yourself have taken it. Hambleton Durrett
can give it to me. He'll accept me on my own terms, he won't interfere
with me, I shan't be disillusionized,--and I shall have a position which
I could not hope to have if I remained unmarried, a very marked position
as Hambleton Durrett's wife. I am thirty, you know."
Her frankness appalled me.
"The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive yourself. You
throw a glamour over things. You want to keep your cake and eat it too.
"I don't see why you say that. And marriage especially--"
She took me up.
"Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? Unless she is married,
and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up,
she is nobody. We can't all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to
imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is
left? Nothing but marriage. I'm hard and cynical, you will say, but I
have thought, and I'm not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in
the face. There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real
thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn't be
willing to do their own cooking in order to get it."
She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room.
"For God's sake, don't do this, Nancy!" I begged.
But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard me.
"If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?" I asked.
"Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what
you once were," she said. A--a sort of good-bye to sentiment."
"Nancy!" I said hoarsely.
She shook her head.
"No, Hugh. Surely you can't misjudge me so!" she answered reproachfully.
"Do you think I should have sent for you if I had meant--that!"
"No, no, I didn't think so. But why not? You--you cared once, and you
tell me plainly you don't love him. It was all a terrible mistake. We
were meant for each other."
"I did love you then," she said. "You never knew how much. And there is
nothing I wouldn't give to bring it all back again. But I can't. It's
gone. You're gone, and I'm gone. I mean what we were. Oh, why did you
change?"
"It was you who changed," I declared, bewildered.
"Couldn't you see--can't you see now what you did? But perhaps you
couldn't help it. Perhaps it was just you, after all."
"What I did?"
"Why couldn't you have held fast to your faith? If you had, you would
have known what it was I adored in you. Oh, I don't mind telling you now,
it was just that faith, Hugh, that faith you had in life, that faith you
had in me. You weren't cynical and calculating, like Ralph Hambleton, you
had imagination. I--I dreamed, too. And do you remember the time when you
made the boat, and we went to Logan's Pond, and you sank in her?"
"And you stayed," I went on, "when all the others ran away? You ran down
the hill like a whirlwind."
She laughed.
"And then you came here one day, to a party, and said you were going to
Harvard, and quarrelled with me."
"Why did you doubt met" I asked agitatedly. "Why didn't you let me see
that you still cared?"
"Because that wasn't you, Hugh, that wasn't your real self. Do you
suppose it mattered to me whether you went to Harvard with the others?
Oh, I was foolish too, I know. I shouldn't have said what I did. But what
is the use of regrets?" she exclaimed. "We've both run after the
practical gods, and the others have hidden their faces from us. It may be
that we are not to blame, either of us, that the practical gods are too
strong. We've learned to love and worship them, and now we can't do
without them."
"We can try, Nancy," I pleaded.
"No," she answered in a low voice, "that's the difference between you and
me. I know myself better than you know yourself, and I know you better."
She smiled again. "Unless we could have it all back again, I shouldn't
want any of it. You do not love me--"