"I can realize them when I am alone," said Isabel, defiantly. "I shall be as happy as ever on the ranch, the day after to-morrow."
"That sort of happiness will do very well for a while—living in your imagination and all that. But what is it going to lead to?"
"Lead to? It is enough in itself."
"You can't live on moonshine for ever. I told you before that I understood your particular form of idealism; but although I believe that man will certainly be happier when he lives more within that structure of infinite variety, himself, less and less dependent upon the aggregations Life has devised for amusing and tormenting him, still we must reach that condition by very slow degrees; if we take it with a leap the result will be an ugly and disastrous selfishness. If you can prove to the world that you have found happiness in the cultivation of the higher faculties, you will serve a purpose in life, for you will encourage a certain class of women born with such serious lacks, in the health or the affections, or even in the power to endure the mere monotonies of married life, that they are better off alone; but who often feel themselves a failure and drop into morbidity and decay. That means contact for your highness, however. If you sit down by your marsh for the rest of your life and dream, you miss the whole point. And when time forced you to realize the uncompromising selfishness of such a life—where would your happiness be then?"
"Now you are talking by the book. Why are we so sure that it is a part of our duty to make others happy? That may be but one more superstition to rout. If we manage to be happy ourselves, and through the exercise of the higher faculties alone, we may be serving an end decreed from the beginning; by some subtle process, as incomprehensible as even the commonplaces of life, add to the sum of happiness, and so serve life far better than by scattering ourselves all over the surface. But I told you something of this before and have not forgotten the result."
"Neither have I, but one can get accustomed to any idea. What I want to know is—do you leave youth entirely out of your calculations?"
"Oh—youth! Well—it is possible I might not if I had not lived through its tragedy already—for which I am thankful."
"You have had romance and tragedy, and you are a very experienced young woman, but you have not had happiness," said Gwynne, shrewdly. "That, too, is a birthright, and sooner or later you will demand it. Social conquests have palled in seven days. In time chickens also will cease to satisfy, and books, and dreams, and sunsets, and liberty. The peculiar conditions and events of your first quarter-century demanded an interval before beginning again; and filled with all you have deliberately chosen—all, that is, but chickens, which are a work not of God but of supererogation. But intervals come to an end like other things. When this finishes you will suddenly demand happiness—the real thing."
"You mean that I will fall in love again, I suppose."
"I mean that you will love."