“With a vagabond? Because you are like me. Yes, you are! You hate the shams as I do. You long for a real life, for a true love—just the emotions and passions of common earth.”
“Be silent.”
He pursued his advantage relentlessly.
“Underneath that air of Madam Rich-and-Haughty, you are as romantic as a schoolgirl, you who think you are cold and shallow! You, who.... Are you crying?” She had dropped into her nook of the settee, with her face hidden on her arm. He went to her.
“I—I—oh, you are very cruel.”
“Yes. It is torture, to really see oneself.” She resisted this, feebly.
“Oh, no—I’m not like that. Why should you think...?”
“Because I have read your heart in a book.” He lifted the volume. “How you are longing for love—for a common, warm, human love. If some man, no matter who or what he was, came to you—if even a vagabond were to forget ‘the queen’ and throw himself boldly at your feet—you would ‘stoop and kiss him with your soul.’”
She turned her face up to him, then hid her eyes again from the look in his—a look, searching and tender, that seemed to envelop her like a caress, and to deny the trivialities of station and degree and the opulent solidity of the Mearely house. It spoke from the life in him to the life in her, with promise. He leaned over, near her, but not touching her. “Who could have comprehended?” he whispered, wondering at his own emotion for her, but accepting it with the same faith and reverence with which he accepted sunrise, the falling of a star, or the fragrance of the beneficent pines.
She looked up again and no longer hid the need she felt.