“Sweet, isn’t she?” he said, as Gertrude returned it to him, smiling through her tears.
“She’s a darling,” Gertrude said fervently. “Did she hurt you so much, Jimmie dear?”
“I wanted her,” Jimmie answered slowly, “but I think it was because I thought she was mine,—that I could make her mine. When I found she was Peter’s,—had been Peter’s all the time, the thought somehow cured me. She was dead right, you know. I made it up out of the stuff that dreams are made of. God knows I love her, but—but that personal thing has gone out of it. She’s my little lost child,—or my sister. A man wants his own to be his own, Gertrude.”
“Yes, I know.”
“My—my real trouble is that I’m at sea again. I thought that I cared,—that I was anchored for good. It’s the drifting that plays the deuce with me. If the thought of that sweet child and the grief at her loss can’t hold me, what can? What hope is there for me?”
“I don’t know,” Gertrude laughed.
“Don’t laugh at me. You’ve always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so to have any respect for me, I guess. You’ve got your work,” he waved 280 his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting, “and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I’m a poor rudderless creature without any hope or direction.” He buried his face in his hands. “You don’t know it,” he said, with an effort to conceal the fact that his shoulders were shaking, “but you see before you a human soul in the actual process of dissolution.”
Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to her breast.
“Put it here where it belongs,” she said softly.
“Do you mean it?” he whispered. “Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your heart?”