"Things are different for me in every way. But I should have thought you would reign over them like a queen."
"A queen! I have been a slave all my life. I see it now. A slave to other people's passions—Tom Fulton's cruelty, my father's greed."
"His greed for money? I don't always understand you when you speak of him."
"For money, power, everything that makes up life. My father is one great hunger. Give him the world and he would eat it up."
Images crowded upon her. It seemed to her that here in the silence, with the spaces of the dark about her and that voice answering, her thought was generated like the lightning.
"Do you see," she asked suddenly, "how I blame those two men, and not myself? I am the sinner. The sinner ought to own his sin. I don't know whether I have sinned or not. I believed in love, and because I believed in it, those two men betrayed me. That was how I was taught not to believe in anything."
"Don't you believe any more?"
"Oh, I don't know! I don't know!" It was a despairing cry. "There is kindness, I know that. Peter is kind. Your grandmother is the kindest person in the world. But that one thing I dreamed about—why, Osmond, that one thing was the most beautiful thing God ever made."
"Tell me more about it."
"You have thought about it, too. We can't be so much alike, you and I, and not have thought the same things."