“Your picture spoke to me from Le Poer’s table,” he said, as though there had been no interruption, “and then he told me all about you. Do you mind? Ever since I have wanted to speak to you, and tell you that you shall not always be sad. Look here,”—his expressions were very boyish,—“I have had my life broken up too, and yet I am beginning to be glad again, and you must. You are too sweet and splendid to be always sad.”
“You are very young,” she answered quietly, wondering why she did not resent the first spoken sympathy anyone had dared to offer her in all these years. “For me—I am an old woman.”
He was twenty-eight, and she was a year younger, but he knew how sorrow ages the heart, and understood. He moved a pot of fern away from her feet, because it seemed to blur the picture of her, sitting there, and a crumple it had made in the hem of her gown he smoothed out with the simplicity of a child and the gentle hands of a woman.
“I am not so young. I have tasted the rough of the world and some of its joys, and I still love the joys. You are in danger of loving its sorrows so much that you will not be able to be happy again when you have the chance.”
“I shall never have the chance, boy, not in this world anyhow; the gods will take care of that.”
“Well, in the next then,” he persisted. “I have all sorts of splendid theories about our failures here being our triumphs there, haven’t you? Don’t you—when things go all askew, find yourself building on what comes—after?”
Her lips curved in a wry smile. Truth to tell, this world had treated her so ill that she had but small hope of the next.
He went on speaking with an amazing buoyancy in his voice.
“If death were not so hemmed in with the sickness and horrors that frighten a man! If it would only come to one quickly, out in the open air and sunshine—in a rush of living excitement—how many of us would stay, I wonder?”
“I would,” she cried, with a shiver, “I would.”