"With my own," I went on, as if she had not interrupted. "Yours is—yours, honestly got. It makes you proud, happy. Mine—" I did not finish.
She must have seen or felt how profoundly I was moved, for I presently saw her looking at me with an expression I might have resented for its pity from any other than her. "Why do you tell me this?" she asked.
"There is always for every one," was my answer, "some person to whom he shows himself as he is. You are that person for me because—I'm surrounded by people who care for me for what I can give. Even my children care to a great extent for that reason. It's the penalty for having the power to give the material things all human beings crave. Only two persons ever cared—cared much for me just because I was myself. They were my mother—and you."
She laughed in quiet raillery. "Two have cared for you, but you have cared for only one. And what devotion you have given him!"
"I have cared for my mother—for my children—"
"Yes—your children. I forgot them."
"And—for you."
She made what I thought a movement of impatience.
"For you," I repeated. Then: "Elizabeth, you were right when you wrote that I was a coward."
She rose and stood—near enough to me for me to catch her faint, elusive perfume—and gazed out into the distance.