She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?"
He frowned up at her.
"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?"
"No—I don't know," she confessed.
He was smiling now.
"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has passed."
"But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking."
He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths.
"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts—those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."
She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see.