He bent his head. "A dozen if you like."
"Well, there's only one—it's this: I wasn't born to be a poet. It was all a big mistake, and I've found it out in plenty of time to stop. I'd rather do other things, you know; I'd rather live."
"Live," he repeated curiously; and the incidents of his own life flashed quickly, one by one, across his mind. Marriage, birth, death, the illusion of desire, the disenchantment of possession; to place one's faith in the external object and to stake one's happiness on the accident of events—did these things constitute living for such as she?
"When you say 'life' do you not mean action?" he asked slowly.
"Oh, I want to be, to know, to feel," she replied almost impatiently. "I want to go through everything, to turn every page, to experience all that can be experienced upon the earth."
A smile was in his eyes as he shook his head. "And when you have accomplished all these interesting things," he said, "you will have gained from them—what? The lesson, learned perhaps in great sorrow, that the outward events in life are of no greater significance than the falling of the rain on the growing corn. Nothing that can happen or that cannot happen to one matters very much in the history of one's experience, and the biggest incident that ever came since the beginning of the world never brought happiness in itself alone. It may be," he added, with a tenderness which he made no effort to keep from his voice, "that you will arrive finally at the knowledge that all life is forfeiture in one way or another, and that the biggest thing in it is sometimes to go without."
His tone was not sad—the cheerful sound of it was what impressed her most, and when she looked up at him she was almost surprised by the smiling earnestness in his face.
"Do you mean that this is what you have learned?" she asked.
Her seriousness sent him off into his pleasant laugh. "Whatever I have learned it has not been ingratitude for a meeting like this," he responded gayly. "It is one of my unexpected joys."
"And yet it's a joy that you take small advantage of," she remarked. "I'm almost always at home and I'm very often wishing that you would come. As a last test, will you dine with me to-morrow night?"