"You'd like to have me? You've called me a good 'playmate,' you know. I won't bore you with—with"—he gulped—"this craziness of mine.... If I'm 'good' ... you'll let me stay on?"
"Oh, it's all wrong! It's all wrong, my dear!" said Sophy, quite desperately. "You should go away at once. This is all just a phase ... just a passing...."
"Please," said Loring, with real dignity.
Sophy felt very unhappy. She knew that she was doing wrong to temporise. Yet that cruel kindness of the tender-hearted made her hesitate. She could not bear to banish him all at once in this harsh way.
"Well ... for a little while...." she murmured weakly. "But it would be much better for you to...."
"Please," said Loring again. "Allow me to judge of what will be best for me."
"I ought not to," she said miserably. The whole scene had unnerved her—jarred the fine, secure monotony of the life that she had thought so firmly established. One cannot stand face to face with genuine love without feeling a stir in chords long dumb. Loring's young, idealising passion had set certain strings in Sophy's nature vibrating. It gave her that sensation of aching melancholy with which we listen to the faint notes of an old piano that was rich and mellow in our youth. It made her feel very lonely. She had not once felt lonely since coming home—not once in these calmly joyous years of mental renewal. Restlessness she had known of late, but never loneliness. Now she felt all drooping with the solitude of her own spirit as she walked homeward beside Loring. The soft, dun red of the autumn sky seemed to her like the quiet, sombre glow of her own life that had no more flame to give forth, that had sunk into steady embers, that would presently resolve itself into the white ash of old age. Yet it was wonderful to be loved again—even though she had no love to give in return. It was movingly wonderful—though awful in a way—to feel this tonic answering of slack chords to the full, resonant notes struck from the blazing lyre of youth....
VI
Loring had said that he would be "good" if Sophy did not banish him altogether, and he was, very "good." It was the goodness of a spoilt child that swallows physic for the spoonful of jam to follow. The jam in Loring's case was represented by the hours that he was allowed in Sophy's presence. He had not known himself capable of such self-control. Altogether, his love for Sophy had revealed to him as it were another man cased within the man that he had heretofore thought was himself. This new man was of more sensitive stuff, finer and yet much stronger than the other man had been. It was something like having a sixth sense bestowed on him—this new appetency for all manner of things towards which until now he had only felt a vague indifference. His life, since college days, had been made up of sport, occasional spurts of travel in wild places, girls—to a moderate degree—the usual convivial, surface intercourse with other young bloods—some ennui, generally dispelled by drink (the average young American's ordinary indulgence in "high-balls" as a panacea for tedium).