“Of course I’ve thought of myself. What a question. And thinking of myself meant thinking of you.”
“But you have thought more of Mary Gordon—I mean you have considered her more.”
“Yes; I have.”
She got up and went over and sat down on the edge of the bluff. He filled his pipe. She smiled as the smoke drifted to her. She thought that she had never seen the creek look so beautiful. The stones under the clear water shone like opaque jewels. Great bunches of feathery maiden-hair clung to every boulder. The long delicate strands of the ice-grass trailed far over the water. Tiny trees sprouted from rocks in mid-stream, where moss had gathered. Red lilies and ferns grew close to the brink. The ugly brown roots of a pine clung, squirming, down the bluff.
On the mountain above the plateau a deer leaped once, crashing through the brush, tossing his white horns in terror at sight of man. A squirrel chattered high up in a redwood, where he was packing acorns for the winter. A school of salmon swam serenely down the creek and disappeared in the dark perspective.
Helena sat there for a half-hour. Then she went back to Clive, but did not sit down. He rose also.
“I understand you a little better, I think,” she said. “You won’t like what I am going to say, but I shall say it, anyhow. You have so much good in you. I never thought I should love a good man, but I believe that is really the reason I love you so much. The raw material in me responds to the highly developed in you. You are capable of so much that is way beyond me. I have fine impulses, but they are shallow; lofty ideals, but in a little while they bore me. And you are consistent. Even when you do what you know to be wrong, you never vary in your ideals and faith. I am new and crude and heterogeneous. It is the difference between the Old and the New.”
“You have the richest possibilities of any woman I have ever known——”
“Tell me something. Is it not because Mary Gordon is the more helpless and appeals more to your chivalry?—although you love me more; although I have more beauty and brains and passion, and could make you far happier?”
“That is one reason.”