She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face, lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.
“Oh, Empire building!” she said indifferently. “What of the human need? ... Isn’t that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it’s the most important thing of all. I don’t think so much of the Empire. Of course I’m patriotic; but the human need comes first.”
He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other girl’s quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the State?
So many emotions had held him of late for a space, so many thoughts had filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there, that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that now. Something—something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the understanding—dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost something of worth, which he might never recover.
“It’s odd,” he remarked, “how you set me thinking. I never met any one who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack, and you immediately point out that I’ve got my values wrong. It’s like having one’s sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers were correct. There’s a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you’re right, that’s the worst of it.”
“It’s only your values that are wrong,” she said quietly. “If you readjust those, then the idea is fine enough.”
In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that she would not be satisfied with that.