Florence bit her lip. She was hating to face what she knew she finally must.
“Don’t you remember,” he went on, “a few days ago you said you would have something to tell me on our way back to town?”
A few days ago! Could it be possible! She looked out of the window. Past rushed a stream of black oaks pricked through with flashes of sea.
She knew what she would answer. She had turned it over for twenty-four hours. She had not dreamed how hard it would be to utter. His kindly eyes were bent upon her with a steady patience, but his blunt fingers drummed the arm of her chair.
“I tried then to make you see,” she began, “that I wasn’t merely putting you off. I didn’t know then just what I could say—how much I was fit for what you ask of me.” She supported his look. “Now I am sure I am not.”
He waved away her objection with his large, open hand. “Are you the judge of that?”
“Who else? Do you think I could take without giving? If I loved you it would be different.”
“Yes. Well—I hardly hoped that, after what you said the other day,” he answered sturdily; “but we are no longer children; I would not ask too much of you. You are a woman of wide interests, and my life takes me so much among people, manipulations of men as well as things, you might—”
She took it up. “Yes, if I could give your interests all my interest, all my energy, my thought, as I might have done once, as I would now, gladly, if I could. But I can’t. I have used up such power as I had. I’ve done all I can do in other people’s interests. Now my interests will be scattered. My ways are already fixed. You offer me an active life in the world, but I am through my activities.”
“Good Heaven!” he broke out; “why, you talk as if you were old—you, with the best of your life before you!”