"Naturally!"
"What difference does my money make?" he demanded.
"Don't you realize the increase of your power as a human being?" she replied. "Don't you realize the larger possibilities of the life that is open to you? You can move, if you will, in the big world. You can take your place in any society you choose, meet interesting people who have done things, learn everything that is new, do everything that is worth doing in life. You can travel to the remote countries of the globe. You can become a politician, a philanthropist, or a sportsman. You can follow your tastes wherever they lead you, and—perhaps this is the most important thing of all—you can do everything upon a splendid scale."
He smiled down at her.
"That all sounds very nice," he admitted, "but supposing that I have no taste in any of the directions you have mentioned? Supposing my life here satisfies me? Supposing I find all that I expect to find in life here on my own land, among my own hills? What then?"
She looked at him with a curiosity which was almost passionate. Her lips were parted, her senses strained.
"It is not possible," she exclaimed, "that you can mean it!"
"But why not?" he protested. "I have not the tortuous brain of the modern politician. I hate cities—the smell of them, the atmosphere of them, the life in them. The desire for travel is only half born in me. That may come—I cannot tell. I love the daily work here; I am fond of horses and dogs. I know every yard of land we own, and I know what it will produce. It interests me to try experiments—new crops, a new distribution of crops, new machinery sometimes, new methods of fertilizing. I love to watch the seasons come and reign and pass. I love to feel the wind and the sun, and even the rain. All these things have become a sort of appetite to me. I am afraid," he wound up a little lamely, "that this is all very badly expressed, but the whole truth of it is, you see, that I am a man of simple and inherited tastes. I feel that my life is here, and I live it here and I love it. Why should I go out like a Don Quixote and search for vague adventures?"
"Because you are a man!" she answered swiftly. "You have a brain and a soul too big for your life here. You eat and drink, and physically you flourish, but part of you sleeps because it is shut away from the world of real things. Don't you sometimes feel it in your very heart that life, as we were meant to live it, can only be lived among your fellow men?"
He looked upward, over his shoulder, at the little cluster of farm-buildings and cottages, and the gray stone church.