Her voice trembled too much for her to manage it. He glanced at her and saw her lip was twitching violently, and savagely thought a man sometime would have a right to kiss it. And yet what did he care? To kiss a woman's lips was a madness or a splendour that passed. He knew there might be, almost incredibly, another undying passion that did last, made up of endurance and loyalty and the free rough fellowship between men. This girl, this soft yet unyielding thing, was capable of that. But she must not squander it on him who was bankrupt. Yet here she was, in her house of dreams, tended by divine ministrants of the ideal: the old lying servitors that let us believe life is what we make it and deaf to the creatures raging there outside who swear it is made irrevocably for us. He was sure they lied, these servitors in the house of maiden dreams. Yet how to tell her so! And would he do it if he could?
"You see," he said irrelevantly, "I want you to have your life."
"It will be my life," she said. "To take care of Farvie, as we always have. To make things nice for you in the house. I don't believe you and Farvie'd like it at all without Anne and me."
She was announcing, he saw, quite plainly, that she didn't want a romantic pact with him. They had met, just once, for an instant, in the meeting of their lips, and Lydia had simply taken that shred of triumphant life up to the mountain-top to weave her nest of it: a nest where she was to warm all sorts of brooding wonders for him and for her father. There was nothing to be done with her in her innocence, her ignorance, her beauty of devotion.
"It doesn't make any difference about me," he said. "I'm out of the running in every possible way. But it makes a lot of difference about you and Anne."
"It doesn't make any difference to Anne," said Lydia astutely, "because she's going to heaven, and so she doesn't care about what she has here."
He was most amusedly anxious to know whether Lydia also was going to heaven.
"Do you care what happens to you here?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered instantly. "I care about staying with my folks."
The homely touch almost conquered him. He thought perhaps such a fierce little barbarian might even find it better to eat bitter bread with her own than to wander out into strange flowery paths.