“Oh, yes—even the affections—but punched, like a railway ticket,” answered Griggs, promptly. Everybody laughed a little, except Griggs himself.
“Of course the affections are transferable,” he continued, meditatively. “The affections are the hat—the object is only the peg on which it’s hung. One peg is almost as good as another—if it’s within reach; but the best place for the hat is on the man’s own head. Nothing shields a man like devoting all his affections to himself.”
“That’s perfectly outrageous!” exclaimed Hester Crowdie. “You make one think that you don’t believe in anything! Oh, it’s too bad—really it is!”
“I believe in ever so many things, my dear lady,” answered Griggs, looking at her with a singularly gentle expression on his weather-beaten face. “I believe in lots of good things—more than Crowdie does, as he knows. I believe in roses, and green fields, and love, as much as you do. Only—the things one believes in are not always good for one—it depends—love’s path may lie among roses or among thorns; yet the path always has two ends—the one end is life, if the love is true.”
“And the other?” asked Katharine, meeting his far-away glance.
“The other is death,” he answered, almost solemnly.
A momentary silence followed the words. Even Crowdie made no remark, while both Hester and Katharine watched the elder man’s face, as women do when a man who has known the world well speaks seriously of love.
“But then,” added Griggs himself, more lightly, and as though to destroy the impression he had made, “most people never go to either end of the path. They enter at one side, look up and down it, cross it, and go out at the other. Something frightens them, or they don’t like the colour of the roses, or they’re afraid of the thorns—in nine cases out of ten, something drives them out of it.”
“How can one be driven out of love?” asked Katharine, gravely.
“I put the thing generally, and adorned it with nice similes and things—and now you want me to explain all the details!” protested Griggs, with a little rough laugh. “How can one be driven out of love? In many ways, I fancy. By a real or imaginary fault of the other person in the path, I suppose, as much as by anything. It won’t do to stand at trifles when one loves. There’s a meaning in the words of the marriage service—‘for better, for worse.’ ”