The girl's lips parted in that same pathetic smile, but then they began to quiver, trembling so that she could not speak.
"I wonder at you," Magnus repeated. "Why don't you tell me all your mind, and bid me go? What do you want of such a Derelict?"
"Magnus, you are very hard to me."
"I? Hard to you?" Magnus repeated, at her feet now. "To you? My beauty, and treasure, and heart's delight? The girl I love best in all the world, and the only one I ever can love better than everything else. I, hard to you? The girl I left behind me, with my heart in her keeping. And now she sits there, despising me. Cherry, I never was anything but true to you; never. I have fooled with other girls, but I did not care a red cent for the whole lot."
"No—" Cherry said, drawing a long, long sigh. "Oh Magnus! you were not true to yourself."
"Never mind me," Magnus answered unreasonably. "I don't want you for a missionary. If I've got to have one, call in some old wrinkled specimen that will not distract my mind. If you don't care anything about me except to get me creditably out of the world, why, say so. I have told you all the worst things about myself. And if you are willing to work it as we always did; I carrying you over the hard places, and you brushing the mud off with your own little hands—you can say that, too."
"Oh, Magnus!" she cried, "there must not be any mud."
"There must not be, and there isn't going to be; but what if there was? We can't have the marriage service made over just for us two, I suppose. I mean it shall be for better and better, every day I live—but you've got to take me 'for better, for worse.'"
I fancy few men have any faint notion what it is to a woman to have her image of perfection marred; perhaps men less often set up ideals, unless in the line of beauty; and that is altogether a lower erection. To see "fragile" written on your tower of strength, and the hero marked "human," in unmistakable letters, is a very, very sharp lesson. A good one, though; the sooner that form of idolatry ceases the better; letting the woman down—or up—to her proper station of helpmeet. Cherry's heart was ringing yet with the ache and the sorrow, her eyes dazed with this sudden mortal light let in upon the world of dreams and imaginations.
Her love was not changed, she knew that; as it had gone out to the hero, so still it went out to the man, and would, while her life lasted. No question to settle there. But now another was stirring in the girl's heart, coming on a sudden uncalled for, unwelcome—and the old words of the apostle confronted her: