“Why don’t you fill it with people?”
“You forget that I don’t like people,” said Odd.
“You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty as landowner and country gentleman.”
“Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness.”
“The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn’t care to see us! No, I think I prefer Paris to the Priory.”
“What do you do with yourself in Paris?”
“Very little that amounts to anything,” Katherine owned; “one can’t very well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn’t born with them, one must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good fighter if I had my weapons!” and Katherine’s dark eye, as it flashed round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him.
“Yes,” he said, “I think you would be a good fighter. What would you fight?”
“The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more’s the pity.”
“And the flesh and the devil,” Odd suggested; “is this to be a moral crusade?”