“No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.”
“You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You, you, to sue to such a man. He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be like fighting for breath. If you marry him,—if you bring him to it,—he’ll suffocate you.”
“No, Jim,” she repeated,—and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,—“I am the stronger.”
“In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill you.”
“Even if he kills me he’ll not conquer me.”
He shook away the transcendentalism with a gentle impatience, “Much good that would do to me, who would only know that you were gone. Oh, Eppie!—“
He pressed and let fall her hand.
The words of the crisis were over. Anything else would be only, as it were, the filling in of the grave.
He had walked away from her to the window, and said presently, while he looked out: “And I thought that you were ambitious. I loved you for it, too. I didn’t want a wife who would acquiesce in the common lot or make a virtue of incapacity. I wanted a woman who would rather fail, open-eyed, in a big venture than rest in security. You would have buckled the sword on a man and told him that he must conquer high places for you. You would have told him that he must crown you and make you shine in the world’s eyes, as well as in his own. And I could do it. You are so worthy of all the biggest opportunities and so unfit for little places. It’s so stupid, you know,” he finished, “that you aren’t in love with me.”
“It is stupid, I own it,” Eppie acquiesced.