"Yes, hate it," she insisted. The chief pleasure in this friendship with him was that it gave her freedom to be herself, to be frank. She would not let him spoil it for her, as Richard had in their early married days spoiled even the times of closest intimacy with formalism and restraint. "I want to know—I want to live," she went on, with glowing, eager face. "I've always felt proud it was the woman who had the sense to eat the apple. I detest innocence. I love life!"
"Oh, you don't mean exactly that."
"Just that."
"Even—sin?" This, not an inquiry, but an argument proving her beyond question in the wrong.
But she replied undauntedly: "It seems to me, the only way to learn is by doing things. And doesn't that mean making mistakes—sins, as you call it? Life's a good deal like gardening. You have to do it wrong first in order to learn how to do it right."
"That's all very well for a man. But——"
She was giving him one of those disconcerting eerie glances from the mysterious eyes. "I've got to live, and in the same world you have. Also, I've got to bring up a boy to live in it."
"I must say," confessed he, "I don't see just how to meet that." And she accepted the answer as evidence of his broad-minded sympathy. She did not realize that he was anything but convinced, but was simply admitting the "light cleverness" of her reply and was too eager about standing well with her to combat her "queer ideas."
The interruption to the delights of this friendship came before she had nearly exhausted his novelty, and while she was still as uncritical of him as a starving man of the cooking. However, in any circumstances it would have been long before she could have made any accurate judgment of him. She had become his partisan; and a generous nature takes the most favorable, the always too favorable, view of a personality to which it is attracted.
Until that summer Richard had been, for a young man, remarkably careful about regularity and exercise. At the very outset of his task, away back at Johns Hopkins, seven years before, he had realized that he was in for an investigation of all known elements in every possible combination—that is, for a long and hard struggle for about the most jealously guarded of nature's secrets—the origin of heat. And he knew that, if he was to win any victory worth while, he must resist the temptation to overwork, and must make health his first consideration. And although he had small liking for physical exercise and was as little fond of the grind of regularity as the next man, he had kept to his rules for himself with the same inflexible firmness that characterized him in all his serious purposes. But Basil's coming with the additional money he had needed, and the help, too, tempted him beyond his resistance. In exercise, as in everything else, there is system or there is nothing. Before Basil had been there a month Richard was breaking his rules; and soon the whole system went by the board. All summer he had not exercised, and he ate at any hours or not at all. Such a reversal of a long-established routine could not but create an immediate internal commotion. There were no physical surface signs; he looked the same as always; but his temper became uncertain. Where he had been simply absent-minded he was now irascible in it. Without reason—except the internal physical turmoil he himself did not feel or suspect—-he would burst from abstraction to attack Gallatin or Courtney or Winchie or one of the servants, or to rave against everything and everybody. And this new Richard appeared at just the time when it would stand out in sharpest, most odious relief—most dangerous contrast to the even temper of Basil Gallatin. Under the stimulus of her friendship with Gallatin, Courtney had got back much of her former gayety. Again she was overflowing with jest and laughter, with the joy she seemed to have absorbed from the bright things that grew or flitted and flew in her gardens.