“But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my ambitions are good enough for me.”
Selden met this appeal with a laugh. “Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!”
“Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I probably shan’t like them?” She drew a deep breath. “What a miserable future you foresee for me!”
“Well—have you never foreseen it for yourself?” The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.
“Often and often,” she said. “But it looks so much darker when you show it to me!”
He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air.
But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. “Why do you do this to me?” she cried. “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?”
The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon’s solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.
“No, I have nothing to give you instead,” he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. “If I had, it should be yours, you know.”
She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he saw that for a moment she wept.