"You are a better judge than I, Marcia," he observed, "but is such an expedition as you suggest—usual? I know that things have changed very much since the days when I myself found adventures possible and interesting, but have they really progressed so far as this?"
Marcia considered the matter carefully.
"On the whole," she decided, "I should say that our proposed expedition was unusual. On the other hand, Mr. Borden has no near relatives, and I myself enjoy a certain amount of liberty."
The Marquis smiled at her.
"As much liberty as you choose. If I hesitated then for a moment, it was for your own sake. I do not think that I have ever sought to curtail your pleasures, or to interfere in your mode of living."
"You have been wonderful," she admitted gratefully. "Perhaps for that very reason, because my fetters have been of silk, I have never realised but always considered them. Do you know that you are the only man who has ever sat down in this flat as my guest, during the whole sixteen years I have lived here?"
"I should never have asked you," he said, "but I am not in the least surprised to hear it. Sometimes," he went on, drawing her towards him in a slight but affectionate embrace, "you have perhaps thought me a little cold, a little staid and distant from you, even in our happiest moments. I was brought up, you must remember, in the school which considers any exhibition of feeling as a deplorable lapse. The thing grows on one. Yet, Marcia," he added, drawing her still closer and clasping her hand, "you have been my refuge in all these years. It is here with you that I have spent my happiest hours. You have been my consolation in many weary disappointments. I often wish that I could give you a different position than the one which you occupy."
"I should never be so contented in any other," she assured him, patting his hand. "In all these years I have felt my mind grow. I have read—heavens, how I have read! I have felt so many of the old things fall away, felt my feet growing stronger. You have given me just what I wanted, Reginald. To quote one of your own maxims, we have only one life, but it is for us to subdivide. We take up a handful of circumstances, an emotion, perhaps a passion, and we live them out, and when the flame is burnt we are restless for a little time, and then we begin it all over again. That is how we learn, learn to be wise by suffering and change."
"I am afraid," the Marquis sighed, "that I do not live up to my own principles. All my life I have detested change. There could be no other home for me but Mandeleys, no other clubs save those where I spend my spare time, no other pursuits save those which I have cultivated from my youth, no other dear friend, Marcia, to whom one may turn in one's more human moments, than you."
Marcia shrugged her shoulders.