"But what is to prevent your painting as many pictures as you like and still gratifying him?" she asked.
"Because no man can serve two masters, in temporal any more than in spiritual things. If I am to serve Art, I must do so with all my strength, not in a half-hearted dilettante manner—but I am weary of saying these things. I hoped that by this time everyone understood them."
"I understand them perfectly," replied Marion; "but I do not think you are right. I think that, because you have never known the need or want of money, you are throwing away a fortune for a mere caprice, and you are condemning others as well as yourself to lifelong poverty."
"Not to poverty," he observed; "though certainly to narrower means than those my uncle possesses. It is for you to say whether or not you care to accept the life which I offer. I can not change it—I do not believe that even for you it would be best that I should."
"You are very kind to settle what would be best for me so entirely in accordance with your own tastes and will," she said, with her old tone of mockery. "May I ask why you are led to such a belief?"
"It is easily told," he answered, "and I will be perfectly frank in the telling. We all have some one point where temptation assails us with more force than at any other. With you, Marion, that point is an undue value of wealth and of all the things of the world that wealth commands,—things, for the most part, of great danger to one who does value them unduly. The possession of wealth, therefore, would be dangerous to you—more dangerous from the very strength of the passion with which you desire it. Forgive me if this sounds odiously like preaching, but it is true. I can not, then, change the whole intention and meaning of my life—give up my study of art and sink into a mere idle amateur—when by so doing I should gain nothing of value to myself, while working harm rather than good to you. Tell me that you believe I follow my conscience in this, and that you will be content with what I offer you?"
He held out his hand with a pleading gesture, but Marion would not see it. What he had said angered her more deeply than if he had let his refusal remain based solely on his own wishes. That he should recognize hers, yet coolly put them aside, reading her the while a moral lecture on their dangerous nature, filled her with a sense of passionate resentment.
"I might be content with what you offer," she said, "if it were not that you could so easily offer more—you could so easily gratify me, whom you profess to love, as well as the old man who loves you so well. But you will not yield in the least degree to either of us. You follow your own wishes, and declare mine to be mercenary and dangerous. The difference between us is that I have known something of the poverty you regard so lightly; and, while I might risk enduring it with a man who had no alternative of escape from it, I do not think my prospect of happiness would be great with a man who condemned me to it for the gratification of his own selfishness."
"Is that how the matter appears to you?" asked Earle. He paused for a minute and seemed to consider. "You may be right," he said, presently; "I may be acting selfishly—what man can be absolutely certain of his own motives?—but, to the best of my judgment, I am doing what I believe to be right. I can not yield to my uncle in this matter—not even though he has secured you as his advocate. I am sure that if I did yield, it would be worse for all of us. No, Marion; forgive me if I seem hard, but you must take me as I am, or not at all. You must consent to share my life as I have ordered it, or it is best that you should not share it at all."
She bent her head with the air of one who accepts a final decision. "It is very good of you to put it so plainly," she said. "Your candor makes my decision very easy. The matter to me stands simply thus: you decline absolutely to make the least concession to my wishes, you sacrifice my happiness relentlessly to your own caprice, and yet you expect me to believe in the sincerity of your regard. I do not believe in it. I believe, indeed, that you have some kind of a fancy for me; but you think that, because I bring you nothing beside myself, you can make your own terms and order my life as it pleases you—"