“A ruin is a poor illustration of the value of endeavour.”
“I think it is the very best. It shows how greatness would not be debarred itself although it wrought with perishable things in a perishable world.”
I sat silent again; then turned suddenly upon her.
“So that is your ideal,” I said—“to see me passionate in the pursuit of what you think is mine—or should be. Have you none, then, for yourself?”
She looked down and away, tracing a pattern with her fingers in the crumbled stone.
“I do not quite say that,” she said, in a low voice.
“But you are willing to sacrifice it for the other? That is very unselfish of you.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is very unselfish of me.”
There was something so strange in her tone that I looked at her in surprise. What was her meaning? What was that mysterious aspiration of hers which she would so gladly forego, provided my self-realisation were contingent on its sacrifice? And then, still looking away, she said a stranger thing.
“Do you think men of genius ought to marry?”