“Yet they have helped me to live.” Hilda looked hard at him while she spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white.
“Helped you to live, Hilda!” he almost stammered; “my gropings!”
“You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and lit my path!” She smiled, adding: “I suppose you think you have failed because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success.”
“I didn’t even know you read my books.”
“I know your books very well; much better than I know you.”
“Don’t say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them.”
“One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. Perhaps you do even better than you write.”
“Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison.” His voice stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile—
“Shall we dance?”
In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the dance’s circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of desire; he must hear from Hilda’s lips why she had refused Allan Hope.