She started violently, then turned very white. "Don't say that. I've always thought of you as engaged to Madeleine. She was talking to me, and I thought—I—" She stopped, quite shaken.
"You misunderstand her. She's always been in love with one fellow—the one that her parents are against. He's even poorer than I am."
Then Jane pressed her lips together and interlocked her fingers. "I can never marry. I never think of it. There's money to be paid, nobody to pay it but me, and no way to get it except to earn it."
Lorenzo looked almost sternly at her. "What about the book you lent me; it would say that that was setting limits. It says that we've not to concern ourselves with ways and means. I've only to concern myself with loving you. The rest will come along of its own accord."
She shook her head. "No, it won't. This world is all learning, and it's part of my lesson not to be able to apply it in absolute faith to myself. So many teachers have wisdom to give away which they can't quite take unto themselves, you know." She smiled a little tremulously.
"But you ought to take it unto yourself. It ought to be easy and simple for you to realize that if conditions are false, they don't exist; that if you want a home, it's because you are going to have one; that if I love you, it's because it's right that you should be loved."
She put her hands down helplessly on each side of the chair-seat. "I never even think of such things," she said, almost in a whisper.
"But why not?"
"I've always been so necessary to others. I've no rights in my own life."
"But if life is a thing to guide, why not guide your beneficence as well from a basis of home as from one of homelessness?"