“Let me tell him, when I get home, that I’ve seen you again,” he supplicated. “Let me arrange a meeting.”
Slowly, not lifting her eyes, she shook her head and he heard her, just heard her say: “It’s not pride. Don’t think that.”
“No; no; I know it’s not. Good heavens, I couldn’t think it that. You feel it’s no good. You feel that his heart is occupied. It is. I can’t pretend to hide from you that it is. But your place in it was supreme. There would be no unfairness if you took it again. Nancy would be the first person to want you to take it. You know that that is true of Nancy.”
“I know. I heard her plead for me,” said Adrienne.
The sentence fell, soft and trenchant; and he remembered, in the silence that followed, what she had heard. He drew a long breath, feeling half suffocated. But he had met his test. It was inevitable, he knew it now, that she should say “Barney and I are parted for ever.”
Silence dropped again between them. He did not know what was passing behind its curtain and whether bitterness or only grief was in her heart.
He lay, drawing the slow, careful breaths of his recovery, and saw her presently put out her hand and take up her New York Herald and unfold it. She looked down the columns unseeingly; but the little feint of interest helped her.
Slowly the colour faded from her face and it was as if the curtain lifted when, laying the paper down, she said, and he knew that she was finding words to comfort him: “Really everything is quite clear before me now. I shall write at once to Hamilton, and to his mother. If he agrees, if they all agree, he and I can go away very soon I think. Afterwards, I shall stay over here. I’ve quite made up my mind to that. There’ll be so much to do; for years and years; for all one’s lifetime. Ways will open. When one is big,” she smiled the smile at once so gentle and so bitter, “and has plenty of money, ways always do. I’m a déracinée creature; I never had any roots, you know; and I can’t do better, I’m sure, than to make soil for the uprooted people to grow in again. That’s what’s most needed now, isn’t it? Soil. It’s the fundamental things of life, its bare possibilities, that have been so terribly destroyed over here. America has, still, more soil than she can use, and since I’m an American, and a rich one, my best plan is to use America, in my fortune and my person, for Europe. Because I love them both and because they both need each other.”
She had quite recovered herself Her face had found again its pale, fawn tints and she was looking at him with her quietest contemplation while he, in silence, lay looking at her.
“It’s not about the things I shall do that I’m perplexed, ever,” she went on. “But I’m sometimes perplexed about myself. I sometimes wish I were a Roman Catholic. In an order of some kind. Under direction. To put oneself in the hands of a wise director, it must be so peaceful. Like French friends I have; such wise, fine women; so poised and so secure. I often envy them. But that can’t be for me.”