Siegmund looked at her. She seemed very hard in judgement—very blind. Sometimes his soul surged against her in hatred.
“Do you think the man wanted to drown the boat?” he asked.
“He nearly succeeded,” she replied.
There was antagonism between them. Siegmund recognized in Helena the world sitting in judgement, and he hated it. “But, after all,” he thought, I suppose it is the only way to get along, to judge the event and not the person. I have a disease of sympathy, a vice of exoneration.”
Nevertheless, he did not love Helena as a judge. He thought rather of the woman in the boat. She was evidently one who watched the sources of life, saw it great and impersonal.
“Would the woman cry, or hug and kiss the boy when she got on board?” he asked.
“I rather think not. Why?” she replied.
“I hope she didn’t,” he said.
Helena sat watching the water spurt back from the bows. She was very much in love with Siegmund. He was suggestive; he stimulated her. But to her mind he had not her own dark eyes of hesitation; he was swift and proud as the wind. She never realized his helplessness.
Siegmund was gathering strength from the thought of that other woman’s courage. If she had so much restraint as not to cry out, or alarm the boy, if she had so much grace not to complain to her husband, surely he himself might refrain from revealing his own fear of Helena, and from lamenting his hard fate.