"For what, in heaven's name? What use have you for so much strength? You have forsworn matrimony. You disclaim the intention of going forth and entering the great battle of the intellects—having, as you say, no talents. You have isolated yourself from love, so you need no uncommon supply of strength to meet suffering. You will always have money enough, and you appear to have been born with the gift of making it. Even if you elect to be the leader of fashion in San Francisco, your equipment need not be of unadulterated steel. But I cannot fancy why you entertain any such ambition."
"That is the least of my ambition—although I intend to become the most notable woman in San Francisco, not only because I must gratify a healthy natural ambition in some way, and because I want my life to have a sufficiency of incident in it, but because it is a part of my general scheme."
"What is this precious scheme?"
"You would not understand if I should tell you. Men have no time for subjectivities—except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like, who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you from the first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, is that you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with no feminine morbid tendency to analyze your ego, in spite of your Celtic blood. I met too many of that sort in Europe."
Gwynne, with his elbows on his knees, regarded the bottom of the boat and colored guiltily, while congratulating himself that for all her insight and cleverness she had barely penetrated his outer envelope. She had thought him merely homesick, when his ego had been tottering, his soul racked with doubt and terror; when he had spent long hours in self-analysis; until the law had come to his rescue and reinvigorated his brain. At the same time a wave of sadness swept over him. How little human beings knew one another, no matter how intimate. As he raised his eyes he seemed to see Isabel across a chasm as vast as the Atlantic; and he was reminded that he knew her as little as she him. She had confessed to the throes of what she believed to have been a great passion, but when he had rehearsed the story away from the influence of her curious cold magnetism and the sinister setting of its recital, he had recognized it for what it was, the first violent embrace of an ardent unshackled imagination with positive experience, in which the ego had played an insignificant part. Her immediate recovery upon beholding the disintegrating clay, without one regret for the vanished soul, or even for the magnetic warmth of the living shell, suggested to his groping masculine intelligence, totally unaccustomed to analysis of woman, that her attack had been little more personal than if the man had infected her with the microbe of influenza. Surely a woman that had loved a man well enough to kiss him must have been stabbed with pity for the ardent vigorous life thrust out into the dark. Then he felt a quick resentment that anything so stainlessly statuesque as this girl—for all her trim tailoring and large black hat—should have been even superficially possessed by any man.
"Did that Johnny ever kiss you?" he asked, abruptly.
"Of course," replied Isabel. "Did I not have to, being engaged to him? Not that there was much chance, for I never saw him alone between four walls. Perhaps that was one reason that side of love seemed to me much overrated. I was happiest when sitting alone in a sort of trance and thinking about him."
"Humph!" said Gwynne.
The mist was gone. The east was a vast alcove of gold in which the hills were set like hard dark jewels. The creek was narrowing. On either side, and far on all sides, stretched the marsh. The guileless duck disported himself on the ponds, but Gwynne, for once, was insensible to its subversive charms, felt no regret that he had forgotten his gun. He came and sat closer to Isabel, wondering if she felt as young as he did in the wonderful freshness and beauty of the dawn. She certainly looked very young and fresh and girlish, not in the least fateful, as when she turned her profile against a hard background and forgot his presence.
"I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me," he said, smiling into her eyes. "Please give me your reasons for cultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intention to marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead them against the more occupied and disunited sex? I am told that it is a standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join that Literary—Political—Improvement—and all the rest of it Club. I should think with your ambitions and—well—masterful disposition, you would assume its leadership as a sort of preliminary course."