“I can do it,” she assured him. “I believe you doubt my ability, but you need not”
“I want you to answer me,” she said, “it is not too late. Shall I give up Bathilde—and the stage? Listen! You do not know anything of my circumstances. I am not dependent upon either the stage or my writing for a living. I ask you for your honest advice. Shall I give it up?”
“You are placing a very heavy responsibility upon my shoulders,” he answered her thoughtfully. “Yet I will try to answer you honestly. I should be happier if I could advise you to give it up! But I cannot! You have the gift—you must use it. The obligation of self-development is heaviest upon the shoulders of those whose foreheads Nature’s twin-sister has touched with fire! I would it were any other gift, Berenice; but that is only a personal feeling. No! you must follow out your destiny. You have an opportunity of occupying a unique and marvellous position. You can create a new ideal. Only be true always to yourself. Be very jealous indeed of absorbing any of the modes of thought and life which will spring up everywhere around you in the new world. Remember it is the old ideals which are the sweetest and the truest.... Forgive me, please! I am talking like a pedagogue.”
“You are talking as I like to be talked to,” she answered. “Yet you need not fear that my head will be turned, even if the success should come. You forget that I am almost an old woman. The religion of my life has long been conceived and fashioned.”
He looked at her with a curious smile. If thirty seemed old to her, what must she think of him?
“I wonder,” he said simply, “if you would think me impertinent if I were to ask you to tell me more about yourself. How is it that you are altogether alone in the world?”
The words had scarcely left his lips before he would have given much to have recalled them. He saw her start, flinch back as though she had been struck, and a grey pallor spread itself over her face, almost to the lips. She looked at him fixedly for several moments without speaking.
“One day,” she said, “I will tell you all that. You shall know everything. But not now; not yet.”
“Whenever you will,” he answered, ignoring her evident agitation. “Come! what do you say to a walk down through the Park? To-day is a holiday for me—a day to be marked with a white stone. I have registered an oath that I will not even look at a pen. Will you not help me to keep it?”
“By all means,” she answered blithely. “I will take you home with me, and keep you there till the hour of temptation has passed. To-day is to be my last day of idleness! I too have need of a white stone.”