“I think you had better not.”
“Well,” he submitted reluctantly, “perhaps my conversation was in the nature of a confidential communication to myself. Yet it is almost impossible for me to believe you did not actually share it.”
It was still more difficult for her to resist the invitation to share it now. The candle sputtering on its last quarter ate its course voraciously as though in haste to blend this room with the rest of the dark.
“There seems so much we cannot share with others,” she ventured.
“I never felt it as I do this moment,” he replied. “I think it must be a wonderful experience to lead another through our own peculiar treasure-house of memories. Out of the past we gather so many things—alone; beautiful things, so precious and fine that we hide them deep within ourselves lest the light of merely curious eyes should fade them. Perhaps some of us have partly shared them with the world, in pictures or in verse or in songs, but at best these are but feeble copies. We haven’t done much but suggest their form and color or the tune to which they are set. But some day along comes one—to share them. Then we go back to the Thames, the Seine, and over the saffron road to the Schuyler brook and take that other with us through all the long galleries. So we know for the first time why we have stored them all so carefully.”
Barnes paused. His eyes had grown distant. Her eyes had come nearer. The cat purred contentedly.
“If I were to make a definition of happiness,” he concluded, “it would be this; the privilege of sharing utterly.”
She knew. She had her own treasures—her own gallery. But it had never occurred to her that any other should ever see them. These pictures were to be kept tight locked forever. They were to be reviewed even by her only when alone in the dark with the rest of the world tight asleep around her. And now he had made her feel that after all her greatest joy might come in showing them to another. She looked up to find his eyes upon her. They were so brilliant and yet so gentle that they made her fear lest even now they might pierce too deep.
“We may share most things,” she hastened to speak, “but always there will be something left for ourselves alone, won’t there?”
“Most always,” he admitted.