Patience shook her head. “I don’t know. You may be right in the analysis, but I think you lose a good deal. Love may be a species of insanity, but the man whose brain is crystal is not to be envied by the man whose brain can scorch reason and thought at times. You may save yourself heartbreak, but you miss heaven. If you are a type of the future, woman will change too. Man has been at woman’s feet throughout the centuries. You and your kind will place her on an exact level with yourselves and teach her that love means a comfortable coupling of personalities. Something primitive has gone out of you. You have every ingredient in your make-up except love. Liking and passion don’t make love. When it fades out of man altogether chivalry and homage will go with it. You would do a great deal for me, but you are incapable of any splendid self-sacrifice. You are entirely selfish, although in the most charming way.”
“You are quite right,” he said smiling, “I have not much love in me; just enough to make life a comfortable and pleasant sojourn, but not enough to induce a regret were I obliged to toss it over to-morrow—”
“Nor to make it a life of bitter misery did I leave it.”
“No—to be perfectly frank I should not be bitterly miserable. I should regret—but I should work and readjust myself. I have never yet given a glance to the past. I give few to the future. No man gets more out of the present—”
“I won’t be loved like that,” said Patience, passionately.
He leaned forward and took her hand, patting it gently. “You have depths and heights in your nature which I fully appreciate but which I could never stir nor satisfy,” he said. “Some man will. It won’t be all that you expect—you have too much imagination—but you will have your day. With your nature that is inevitable. I am sorry to give you up. You are the most delightful woman I shall ever know. And if you had married me things would probably have gone along satisfactorily enough. I should have kept your mind occupied and talked to you about yourself—those are the secrets of success in matrimony.”
“Marriage with you would be like playing at matrimony. I want a home and husband and children. I have seen enough to know that unless one is a fanatic like Miss Tremont or Miss Beale, or the temporary result of a new and forced civilisation like Hal, or a mercenary wanton like Rosita—in short, if one is woman par excellence, and most of us, clever or otherwise, even gifted, usually are, nothing else is worth the toil and perplexity of being alive. But you mustn’t leave me,” she added hurriedly; “I can’t stand it here if you don’t come to see me.”
“I shall come exactly as I have done. Why not? Our love-making has barely progressed beyond friendship: we shall hardly recognise any change. I should feel lost if I could not have a talk with you once in a while. I intend to have that for the rest of my life. It isn’t usually the man that proposes the brother racket, but I merely define the basis upon which we have really stood all along.”
After he had gone Patience drew a long sigh of relief. The first terrible mistake of her life was buried with Beverly Peele. A second had been averted. Something seemed rebuilding within her: the undeflected continuation of the little girl in the tower. For the first time she understood herself as absolutely as mortal can; and she paid a tribute to the zigzag of life which had helped her to that final understanding.