"Neither, Ben, it is you," she replied. "I have had you all these months. Without that I could not have lived."
"You have had me," I answered, "ever since the first minute I saw your face. You have had me always."
"Not always. During those years of your great success I thought I had lost you."
"How could you, Sally, when it was all for you, and you knew it?"
"It may have been for me in the beginning, but success, when it came, crowded me out. It left me no room. That's why I didn't really mind the failure, dear, and the poverty—that's why I don't now really mind this burden of debt. Success took you away from me, failure brings you the closer. And when you go from me, Ben, there's something in me, I don't know what—something, like Aunt Matoaca in my blood—that rises up and rebels. If things had gone on like that, if you hadn't come back, I should have grown hard and indifferent. I should have found some other interest."
"Some other interest?" I repeated, while my heart throbbed as if a spasm of memory contracted it.
"Oh, of course, I don't know now just what I mean—but when I look back, I realise that I couldn't have stood many years like that with nothing to fill them. I'd have done something desperate, if it was only going over gates after Bonny. There's one thing they taught me, though, Ben," she added, "and that is that poor Aunt Matoaca was right."
"Right in what, Sally?"
"Right in believing that women must have larger lives—that they mustn't be expected to feed always upon their hearts. You tell them to let love fill their lives, and then when the lives are swept bare and clean of everything else, in place of love you leave mere vacancy—just mere vacancy and nothing but that. How can they fill their lives with love when love isn't there—when it's off in the stock market or the railroad, or wherever its practical affairs may be?"
"But it comes back in the evening."