“That’s a very nice thing to say—but you’re not.”
“I don’t know.... I’m not sure. I could be very easily if I were to see much of you.”
“And Andree?...”
He was really depressed, worried, and she perceived it with genuine sympathy. She saw that this young man was facing a problem whose correct solution would be vital to his happiness and to his future peace of mind. She was able to realize that he was approaching one of those climaxes of the soul which are infinitely more trying and infinitely more potent to modify than could any climax in which the physical predominated. She fancied she knew Kendall rather well and understood him. She fancied he was not complex, but rather simple and straightforward—just a young man—but she was wrong. There were such elements of complexity in him as made for the sharpest of suffering, which would have defied the analysis of the most expert psychologist. She did not perceive the overwhelming importance of his inheritances from mother and father, those beliefs and those sensations and those reactions which were almost a physical part of him as his arms and legs were a physical part of him. She could not know that his body was in constant use as an arena in which Puritanism and dogmas and blind faiths and intolerances of the unknown were battling with that mild toleration derived from his father, that desire to see good in everything, that sweetness which held fast to its faith in mankind, even when it could not understand what mankind was about.... Nor could she know that Kendall himself stood between these adversaries with a mind better equipped than either to see and to appraise, striving with a great hunger for the right, to be modified by the adversaries only as it was right to be modified by them. Youth and the desires of youth for life and pleasure and the knowledge that comes by experiencing was also there with its immature carelessness of consequences.... There was no simplicity here, rather such a complexity as seemed destined to defy solution and to make a decent peace of the soul a thing possible to attain....
A young captain ran down the bank to meet them. “You are Miss Knox?” he asked, cordially.
“Yes.”
“I’m Captain Morris, A.P.M. here—and I’m mighty glad to see you. You don’t mean you’re really going to stay?”
“Really.”
“No!... By Jove!... Say!...” He was inarticulate, but there was no doubting of his delight.
“Captain Ware—Captain Morris,” said Maude, and the two young men shook hands.