'You were delicious. I didn't quite know what to make of you. And perhaps that was the very reason——'
'Reason for what?' asked Harvey, when she broke off and looked not quite so pale as a moment before.
'I forget what I was going to say. But please go on. It's very interesting—as your talk always is.'
'I've said about all. You're not to be dutiful and commonplace; that's the matter in a nutshell.'
'I don't think you can accuse me of ever being commonplace.'
'Perhaps not,' said Harvey.
'And as for dutiful, our duty is to be consistent, don't you think?'
'Yes—if by consistency you mean the steady resolve to make the most of yourself. That's what you had in mind when you came here. As soon as you begin to grow limp, it's time to ask what is the matter. I don't offer any advice; you know yourself better than I can know you. It's for you to tell me what goes on in your mind. What's the use of our living together if you keep your most serious thoughts to yourself?'
Harvey Rolfe glowed with a sense of his own generous wisdom. He had never felt so keen a self-approval. Indeed, that emotion seldom came to solace him; for the most part he was the severest critic of his own doings and sayings. But for once it appeared to him that he uttered golden words, the ripe fruit of experience and reflection. That personal unrest had anything to do with the counsel he offered to his wife, he did not for the moment even suspect. Alma had touched him with her unfamiliar note of simple womanhood, and all at once there was revealed to him a peril of selfishness, from which he strongly recoiled. He seemed to be much older, and Alma much more youthful, than he was wont to perceive. Very gently and sweetly she had put him in mind of this fact; it behoved him to consider it well, and act upon the outcome of such reflection. Heavens! was he in danger of becoming the typical husband—the man who, as he had put it, thinks first of his pipe and slippers? From the outside, no man would more quickly or more contemptuously have noted the common-sense moral of this present situation. Being immediately concerned, he could see nothing in his attitude but a wise and noble disinterestedness. And thus, at a moment when he wittingly held the future in his hands, he prided himself on leaving to Alma an entire responsibility—making her, in the ordinary phrase, mistress of her own fate, and waiting upon her decisions.
'I will think a little longer,' said Alma, sighing contentedly, 'and then we'll talk about it again. It's quite true I was getting a little run down, and perhaps—but we'll talk about it in a day or two.'