She nodded.
"What a blessing that you wrote that letter!"
"I don't know," he replied. "I still think it was a great misfortune. Frankly, I have no idea what to make of my life. I don't know how to start again, to deal with the pieces in any intelligent fashion. Now that I am outside the thing, I see the narrowness of it all, I see that I was giving up many things which are interesting and beautiful, many friendships that might have been delightful, but on the other hand there was always the pressing on, the big, vital side, the great throb of life. I miss it. I feel to myself as a great factory sounds on Sundays and holidays, when the engine that drives all the machinery of the place is silent. I wander among the empty, quiet places, and I am lonely."
"Have you ever loved a woman?" she asked.
Her voice had suddenly dropped. He looked across the table. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes fixed upon his. There was something shining out of them which he did not wholly understand. He only knew that the question seemed to have stirred him in some new way. An intense sense of pleasurable content, a feeling as though he were listening to music, stole through his senses. This was a new thing. He was bewildered. He leaned a little further across the table. He found himself watching the faint blue veins of her delicate fingers, noticing the curious perfume of roses that seemed to come to him from the flutter of the lace around her neck.
"You are a man, Sir Julien. You must be thirty-five—perhaps older. Yet somehow you have the look to me of one who has never cared at all."
"It is true," he admitted.
"Life," she declared, "is a strange place. A few months ago your whole career was one of ambition. Misfortune came, or what you counted a misfortune. You reckoned yourself ruined. It is simply a change of poise. You turn now naturally to the other things in life. Do you know that you will find them greater?"
He shook his head.
"It is too early for me to believe that," he said. "I will admit that now and then in my forced solitude I have sometimes realized that one may become too engrossed in a career of ambition. One may shut out many things in life that are sweet and wholesome. But it is too early yet for me to look back upon what has happened with equanimity and say that I am glad to be a wanderer on the face of the earth, a homeless man, a waif."