“He is monarch of all he surveys,” remarked Manvers.
“Of course I am,” said Tom, “so is everybody.”
“Oh, but we can’t all be monarchs of all we survey,” said Maud.
“But we can,” replied Tom, “simply because we survey so very little. All our horizons are limited. As a matter of fact, of course we are terribly limited, all of us, but we have a beautiful gift of not believing that. We can be monarchs of all we understand, which is what I mean by survey, and that is why people marry. Two people understand each other, and so as they are both monarchs of each other, it is a law of nature that they should then be no longer two, but one.”
This remarkable statement was received in silence.
“Then what do you make of people who are failures—real failures?” said Maud at length.
“God help them!” replied Tom; “they have tried to get what they did not understand. There is nothing so pathetic as that.”
“Why did you acquiesce, Miss Wrexham?” asked Manvers.
Maud hesitated a moment, but assuming with perfect good faith that neither Tom nor Manvers could possibly guess what she meant, replied—
“Because I could not get a thing I wanted, and therefore I assumed that I was not made to get what I wanted.”