"Aunt Katrina has sent me to plead with you; of course that's the last thing she calls it, but it's pleading all the same. I don't make any plea for her, because I don't think, as far as you are concerned, she deserves the least fragment of one; but I will say that I have told her the whole truth about Lanse at last, and that it has been a great blow to her, I have never seen her so much overcome. She has rallied however, she has taken her line; her line is the tenderest pity for you, because you must feel it all to be so entirely your own fault!—you see how much that allows her? But she is so exceedingly anxious—abjectly anxious, to keep you with her, that I think you need fear no unpleasant manifestations of it."
"Aunt Katrina does not really need me. And for myself a change is indispensable."
"But it is so safe for you here—so quiet and protected. It is a species of home, after all. I like to see you, as you are at this moment, sitting in this old garden; it seems to me so much pleasanter for you—with this restful air to breathe—than that bustling, driving New York."
"It may be so. But I need change."
"You cling to that." He paused. "I believe you simply mean freedom."
"Yes, I do mean it. But we are going over the same ground we have already been over; that is useless."
"Everything is changed to me since then," said Winthrop, abruptly. "I have seen you brought back from the very threshold of death, I cannot pretend to be the same."
"I am the same."
"Yes; you didn't see yourself—"
"Don't talk about it, please. It is true that, personally, I do not realize it. But when I think of Mr. Moore, I do; and it makes me ill and faint."