“Not at all—not at all,” said Roger, his panic ludicrously obvious.
“So—it was really noble of you.”
“I can’t permit that, sir,” said Roger. “My only motive was my determination never to marry.”
“I don’t like to hear you say that,” said Richmond. “As the father of a daughter, as a man who wishes to see his daughter in the keeping of a man of the right sort—and how few such there are!—I don’t like to hear any of those few declare against matrimony.”
There was no misunderstanding the trend of this. Incredible though it seemed, the man had come round, was abetting his daughter in her willful whim of conquest! “I’m not opposed to marriage—for others,” said Roger awkwardly. “I simply feel that it is not wise for me. If a man whose life is given to creative work marries a woman he loves he is content. It is the end of achievement, of ambition. Why strive after the lesser when what seems to him the greater has been achieved? If such a man marries unfortunately then the bitterness and the agitations destroy his ability to create. Happy marriage suffocates genius, unhappy marriage strangles it. Death inevitable—in either case.”
The words were not unlike those he had used in describing his position to Beatrice. His manner—the tone, the look of the eyes, the expression of mouth and chin—made them seem entirely different, far more profoundly significant. A man, a serious man, rarely reveals his innermost self to a woman unless he and she have reached a far closer intimacy than Roger had permitted with Beatrice. But talking with Richmond, with another man, one who could and would understand and sympathize, Roger exposed a side of his nature of the existence of which Beatrice had only a faint intuition, no direct or definite knowledge. Richmond had been pushed by the portrait well toward conviction of Roger’s high rank in the aristocracy he esteemed as a man among men. He was now wholly convinced. His daughter, he saw, had chosen more wisely than he knew.
“I see your point,” said Richmond slowly, thoughtfully. “I see your point.”
Roger showed his deep sense of relief.
“It is a good one—a very good one.”
Roger’s tension visibly relaxed.