“I wouldn’t,” he said fervently. “I am so curious and interested in what is hidden that I—”
“Don’t,” she cried out, half in anger, “you are so young, so full of the joy of life, why do you speak of death? Earth must be very sweet to you yet.”
“So it is,” he assented, quickly; “and there are always ambitions here.”
“Ah, yes!” she said, with the relief of one whose feet have found firm ground. “Our ambitions. What do you want?”
He sat up very straight, and his eyes seemed to grow bluer. He loved his profession.
“I want to be as fine as Ravenhill first. You have seen his Hamlet, and know what that means. I want to be his equal and then—alone. Then—but one want at a time is enough, if you mean to achieve it. What do you want?”
She had wanted many things. Her wants had formed the lever by which the gods had worked their irony upon her; and her portion had been dead sea-apples. So now she “went softly under the stars,” and voiced no want. But oh! to write something good—not the petty drivel of Women and Emancipation—but something alive and true, so that Meredith, and Kipling, and Hardy would some day take her by the hand and greet her “comrade.” Oh! to fill in her life with work, work, work, work, noble work, so that there was never a gap left to remember in. O! for rest from the torment of memory and an empty heart.
Did she tell him these things, or did he simply understand? She never remembered afterwards, but she knew that he knew, on that sweet, tropical summer night.
They sat late talking.
The hostess gave her into his charge, and, like all the other guests, they went away in a ricksha, with the bells tinkling and the Zulu boy’s white suit gleaming in the vapoury, delicate light shed by a slender fragment of moon and a star-splashed sky.