"You can't wish it as I do. You will go on and build other houses. You have a career. It seems to me that I've come to the very end."
"You don't realize," he said hesitatingly, "that it was the personal element in this that gave—that gives it its whole meaning, to me. I was working with you and—for you."
He glanced at her eagerly, but with a certain timidity, for some sign that would encourage him. A hundred times at least, in those months when he had spent the whole of almost every day with her, he had been on the point of telling her what was in his heart, why he was so tireless and so absorbed in their task. But he had never had the courage to begin. By what he regarded as a malicious fatality, she had always shifted the conversation to something with which sentiment would not have harmonized at all. Apparently she was quite unconscious that he was a man; and how she could be, when he was so acutely alive to her as a woman, he could not understand. Sometimes he thought she was fond of him—"as fond as a nice girl is likely to be, before the man declares himself." Again, it seemed to him she cared nothing about him except as an architect. Her wealth put around her, not only physically but also mentally, a halo of superiority. He could not judge her as just a woman. He always saw in her the supernal sheen of her father's millions. He knew he had great talent; he was inordinately vain about it in a way—as talented people are apt to be, where they stop short of genius, which—usually, not always—has a true sense of proportion and gets no pleasure from contrasting itself with its inferiors. He would have been as swift as the next man to deny, with honest scorn, that he was a wealth worshiper; and as he was artist enough to worship it only where it took on graceful forms, he could have made out a plausible case for himself. Amy, for example, was not homely or vulgar—or petty. She had good ideas and good taste and concealed the ugly part of her nature as dexterously as by the arrangement of her hair she concealed the fact that it was neither very long nor very thick. Besides, in her intercourse with Alois, there was no reason why any but the best side of her should ever show.
Narcisse gave over trying to make him sensible where Amy was concerned, as soon as she saw upon what he was bent. "He wouldn't think of her seriously if she weren't rich," she said to herself. "But, since he is determined to take her seriously, it's better that he should be able to delude himself into believing he loves her. And maybe he does. Isn't love always nine tenths delusion of some sort?" So, she left him free to go on with Amy, to love her, to win her love if he could. But—could he? He feared not. That so wonderful a creature, one who might marry more millions and blaze, the brightest star in the heavens of fashionable New York, should take him—it seemed unlikely. "She ought to prefer congeniality to wealth," thought he, "but"—with an unconscious inward glance—"it's not in human nature to do it."
As they sat there together in the midst of their completed work, he waiting for some hopeful sign, she at least did not change the subject. "Hasn't what we've been doing had any—personal interest for you?" he urged.
She nodded. "Yes, I owe my interest in it to you," she conceded. But she went on to discourage him with, "We have been such friends. Usually, a young man and a young woman can't be together, as have we, without trying to marry each other."
"That's true," assented he, much dejected. Then, desperately, "That's why I've put off saying what I'm going to say until the work should be done."
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Don't say it, please—not now."
"But you must have known," he pleaded.
"I never thought of it," replied she with an air of frankness that convinced him.