“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “I care for the rose because it is sweet, orderly life. If a man’s feelings are the same, I care just as much for them. But character is not a question of feeling. It is a question of wise action.”
He muttered a passionate oath, and hit the bush again. For the devils were “rending him,” and “that kind goeth not out, except by prayer and fasting.” He was not much of a praying man; and as for fasting, his habitual diet and incessant brandy quaffing did not come under that head, nor produce those calming results. Added to this, three months had passed since Ethelbert Daksha had seemed to him as no woman had ever seemed to him before; and in those three months he had been afraid to approach acquaintanceship, because of the infinite distance between them. This distance he, with all his unpublished record of demoralization, had decency enough to recognize. And now he had a feeling akin to hatred toward Ethelbert, that she should have the impudence to know anything of him except what his “good clothes,” not bad-featured face, and his hitherto very silent tongue might have told.
He forgot that he was living in this new age in which something like occult powers are given to the “pure in heart,” who, seeing God, who is All, and in all, necessarily must see the truth as to the conditions which fill society. His spiritual and intuitional faculties were not dead, but sealed up, and enswathed in cerements of flesh. And so, as he now himself realized, he had nothing but a man’s feelings, hot, blind and passionate, to oppose to the percipient intelligence, that, cool and pure, looked steadily into the seething caldron of his heart.
“If a man’s feelings are orderly, beautiful life, I care just as much for them,” she said again slowly. And as he stood before the Virgin Mother grace in her, an ineffable longing for purity and new creation took possession of him. He covered his eyes and sat down on the steps.
“Mine were beautiful when I was three years old,” he said, “orderly, beautiful life. O good God, yes, they were!” It was a cry of remorse to his Creator, and Ethelbert understood it so.
“I believe that readily, Reginald,” she said, simply; “and I have limitless reverence for them; they were as sweet as this bud.” He took from her hand the exquisite moss-covered wonder, and sat looking at it, while Ethelbert laid the mutilated rose, with its upgathered petals, on a book in her lap.
“You mean that is about what my life is worth now,” said he, pointing at the leaves and torn blossom.
“You choose to do it yourself,” said Ethelbert.
“Who cares?” was the angry response, for he had often sentimentalized with girls over his ruined hopes, and had so led up to sweet flirtations; but Ethelbert’s remark and the level look of her eyes, nipped that sort of a thing in the bud; and his “ugly” was rising at about the rate of ten degrees a second, when she said: “I do.”
“On your honor, do you?” he asked huskily.