“Because of what I did and said in Paris? Because of what I am saying to you now?” He looked at her friendlily. “Oh, no—there you mistake me. I cannot tell why I feel as I do toward you. But I know that I must be truthful and honest with you, that you have a right to demand it of me, as had no one else I ever knew. I must let you know me as I am.”
“You seem delightfully sure that I wish to know.”
“I do not think of that at all. Much as I have thought of you, I have never thought ‘what does she think of me?’ Probably you dismissed me from your mind when you turned away from me in Paris. Probably you will again forget me when you have written your article and passed to other work. But I cannot resist the instinct that impels me on to look upon you as the most important human being in the world for me.”
“I believe that you are honest. I don’t wish to misunderstand your frankness. I’m too impatient of conventions myself to insist upon them in others—that is, in those who respect the real barriers that hedge every human being until he or she chooses to let them down. But”—Emily hesitated and looked apologetically at this “giant with the heart of a boy,” as he seemed to her—“you ought not to forget that everything in your circumstances makes it wrong for you to talk to me thus.”
“It seems so, doesn’t it?” He looked at her gravely. “It looks as if I were a scoundrel. Yet I don’t feel in the least as if I were trying to wrong you in any way. You seem to me far stronger than I. I feel that I am appealing to you for strength.”
The secretary entered, laid the letters before him and went away. He signed them mechanically, folded them and put them in the addressed envelopes. As she rose he rose also and handed them to her.
“After I saw you in Paris,” he said, looking down at her as she stood before him, “I thought it all over. I asked myself whether I had been deceived by your beauty, or whether it was the peculiar circumstances of our meeting, of each of us yielding to an impulse; or whether it was my weariness of all that I am familiar with, my desire for the unfamiliar, the new, the adventurous. And it may be all of these, but there is more beyond them all.”
He paused, then went on in a voice which so thrilled her that she hardly heard his words: “Yes, a great deal more. I wish something, some one, some person to believe in. It is vital to me. I doubt everything and everybody—God, His creatures, myself most of all. And when my eyes fell upon you in Paris, there was that in your face which made me believe in you. I said, ‘She is brave, she is honest, she is strong. She could not be petty or false, or cruel.’ And—I do believe in you. That is all.”
“If you knew,” she said, trying to shake off the spell of his voice and his personality, “you would find me a very ordinary kind of sinner. And then, you would of course proceed to denounce me as if I were a fraud, instead of the innocent cause of your deliberate self-deception.”
“I don’t know what you have done—what particular courses you have taken at life’s university. But I am not so—so deceived in you that I do not note and understand the signs of experience, of—yes, of suffering. I know there must be a cause when at your age a woman can look a man through and through, when she can talk to him sexlessly, when she laughs rarely and smiles reluctantly.”