"I hear he went too far—or put a paw on prey that belonged to some one of the lions. So, he's going to get his deserts. Not that he's any worse than the others. In fact, he's the superior of most of them—unless you choose to think a man who has remnants of decent instinct left and goes against them is worse than the fellow who is rotten through and through and doesn't know any better." Raphael realized he was floundering in deeper and deeper with every word; but he dared not stop, and so went floundering on, more and more confused. "You'll not sympathize with him, when the facts are revealed. It's all his own fault."
A long pause, with him watching her in dread as she sat lost in thought. Presently she came back, drew a long breath, said, "Yes, all and altogether his own fault."
He felt enormously relieved. "Come abroad!" he cried. "Yours is simply a case of a woman's being irritated by indifference into some emotion which, for lack of another name, she calls love. Come abroad and forget it all. Come abroad! Art is there, and dreams! Paris—Italy—flowers—light—and love, perhaps. Come—Neva! Do you want fame? Art will give you that. Do you want love?" Her quickened breath, her widening, wistful eyes made him boldly abandon the pretense that he was lingering with her in friendship's by-path, made him strike into the main road, the great highway. "I will give you love, if you'll not shut your heart against me. You and I have been happy together, haven't we—in our work—happy many an hour, many a day?"
"Yes," she admitted. "I owe you all the real happiness I've ever had."
"Over there, with all this far away and vague—over there, you would quite forget. And happiness would come. What pictures we would paint! What thoughts! What dreams! You still have youth—all of the summer, all of the autumn, and a long, long Indian summer. But no one has youth enough to waste any of it. Come, Neva. Life is holding the brimming, sparkling glass to your lips. Drink!"
As he spoke, he seemed Life itself embodied; she could not but feel as if soft light and sweet sound and the intoxicating odor of summer were flooding, billow on billow, into the sick chamber where her heart lay aching.
"If I can," she said. And her glance made him think of morning sunbeams on leaping waters. "If I can.... What a strange, stubborn thing a sense of duty is!"
"You're really just as far from your father here as you would be there."
"I can't explain," said she. "I'll think it over."
And he saw he would have to be content with that for the present.