“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what has seeing and feeling done to you? Has it made any permanent changes in you? Your experiences here have impressed you a great deal—but how long will the effect last when you get home?... When Paris is just a memory—and a subject for conversation? In ten years will you be any different as a result of all this than you would have been if you had never come?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, slowly. “What do you think?”
“I think,” she said, “that we will get back into the old environments and the old habits and will become just what we would have been. If we were to stay here, then we might change, broaden, really profit by our experiences. But we go home. We see the same faces, hear the same sort of talk, and are tied by the same sort of prejudices and theories and narrownesses that we used to accept without question. We will know better for a while, and then we will revert.... It takes something pretty big and startling to change a person forever.”
“Big and startling.... You mean something in his own life and experience—something personal to him—that is big and startling?”
“Yes.”
“Like—”
“Oh, like committing a crime, or making some supreme decision or sacrifice.... Anything that strains the very soul of a person so that it can never get back into its former shape.”
“Love?”
“Not love itself, but something wonderful or terrible that comes as the result of a love.”