“And you have——”
“Done nothing, you would say,” Kingcote supplied in the pause she made. “Literally nothing; wasted my time, lost my best years. The necessary consequence of being made up of wants, without the powers which could satisfy them. At present I am engaged in the first work I have done for years.”
“At last, then!” Isabel exclaimed.
“Yes, the work of resigning myself to being nothing, of casting off the last foolish flattery of self-conceit, of resolutely bidding myself understand that fate will bear any amount of idle fuming and remain unchanged. It is a task which has its difficulties; rather harder, on the whole, than the realisation of death. Did you ever force yourself to realise death, not to admit it in idle words, but to——”
Isabel motioned him to silence; her face was darkened with a look of pain, of fear.
“Forgive me,” he said in a lower voice; “to me it is such a familiar thought. I talk so seldom that I forget the difference between reflection and conversation.”
She spent a moment in clearing her mind of the disturbing thought—it seemed strangely disturbing, and at length banished it with the laugh occasioned by a new idea.
“I wonder,” she said, changing her attitude, “what you——”
“You were going to say——?”
“You spoke of having thought of commerce. Suppose you had become a man of business, and had made your fortune, what would your views of life be?”