“Because to live in my world—even to step into it from time to time—requires the courage to believe in it.”
“And you think I didn’t?” asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.
“Did you?” he asked steadily. “You ought to know.”
There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car began to develop speed in the first long, open space between settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, “Oh, you don’t realize how things are with a girl—how many million little ways she’s bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as—”
“Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn’t the strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly couldn’t have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to it. So it’s all right, you see.”
Lydia’s drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect. “You mean I’m a poor-spirited, weak thing, who’d better never try to take a step of my own,” she said with a sorry smile.
“I don’t mean anything unkind,” he told her gently. “I’ve succeeded in convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation—and that’s certainly most justifiable. It meant I’d expected too harsh a strength from you—” he went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes did not keep from sadness—“as though I’d hoped you could lift a thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show.”
She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent of seriousness as his own. “Why do you live so that people have to lift thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to you?”
“Because I don’t dare live any other way,” he answered.
“It’s hard on other people,” Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, “But you didn’t help a bit—you left it all to me—”