“I can understand it,” she said. “I can understand, too, how your rooms would affect him. You should have thought of that. If he has gone away altogether, how will you be able to finish your work?”
“I must do without him,” Saton answered.
Pauline looked at him critically, dispassionately.
“I do not believe that you can do without him,” she said. “You are losing your hold upon your work. I have noticed it for weeks. Don’t you think that you are frittering away a great deal of your time and thoughts? Don’t you think that the very small things of life, things that are not worth counting, have absorbed a good deal of your attention lately?”
He was annoyed, and yet flattered that she should speak to him so intimately.
“It may be so,” he admitted. “And yet, do you know why I have chosen to mix a little more with my fellows?”
“No!” she answered. “I do not know why.”
“It is because I must,” he said, lowering his tone. “It is because I must see something of you.”
The lace of her parasol drooped a little. Her face was hidden now, and her voice seemed to come from a long way off.
“That is very foolish,” she said. “In the first place, if my opinion of you is worth anything, I tell you frankly that I would rather see you with ink-stained fingers and worn clothes, climbing your way up toward the truth, working and thinking in an atmosphere which was not befouled with all the small and petty things of life. It seems to me that since it amused you to play the young man of fashion, you have lost your touch—some portion of it, at any rate—upon the greater things.”