"Why do you say 'as a play'?" he asked. "What could it be but a play?" He punctuated his question by tapping the pavement with his cane.
Phillida laughed a little at herself, but added with great seriousness: "Would you think worse of me, Charley, if I should tell you that I don't quite like plays?" And she looked up at him in a manner at once affectionate and protesting.
Millard could not help giving her credit for the delicacy she showed in her manner of differing from him.
"No," he said; "I couldn't but think the best of you in any case, Phillida, but you might make me think worse of myself, you know, for I do like plays. And more than that," he said, turning full upon her, "you might succeed in making me think that you thought the worse of me, and that would be the very worst of all."
This was said in a half-playful tone, but to Phillida it opened again the painful vision of a possible drawing apart through a contrariety of tastes. She therefore said no more in that direction, but contented herself with some general criticisms on Irving's Shylock, the incongruities in which she pointed out, and her criticisms, which were tolerably acute, excited Millard's admiration; and it is not to be expected that a lover's admiration should maintain any just proportion to that which calls it forth.
Again the Thursday sermon at Mrs. Van Horne's came around, and again Phillida was restored to a white heat of zeal mingled with a rueful distrust of her own power to hold herself to the continuous pursuit of her ideal. Millard, perceiving that she dreaded to be invited again, refrained from offering to take her to the theater. He waited several weeks, and then ventured, with some hesitation, to ask her to go with him to see one of the Wagner operas. He was frightened at his own boldness in asking, and he kept his eyes upon the ferule of his cane with which he was tapping the toe of his boot, afraid to look up while she answered. She saw how timidly he asked, and her heart was cruelly wounded by the necessity she felt to refuse; but she had fortified herself to resist just such a temptation.
"I'd rather not go, Charley," she said slowly, in accents so pleading and so full of pain that Millard felt remorse that he should have suggested such a thing.
But this traveling on divergent lines could not but have its effect upon them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman might, with a refinement not possible in our idiom, call an éloignement. In spite of their exertions to come together, they drew apart. This process was interrupted by seasons of renewed tenderness. But Phillida's zeal, favored by Mrs. Frankland's meetings, held her back from those pursuits into which Millard would have drawn her, and only a general interest in her altruistic aims was possible to him. Again and again he made some exertion to enter into her pursuits, but he could never get any farther than he could go by the aid of his check-book. Once or twice she went with him to some public entertainment, but those social pursuits to which he was habituated she avoided as dissipations. Thus they loved each other, but it is pitiful to love as they did, while unable to conceal from themselves that a gulf lay between the main tastes and pursuits of the one and the other.