“Which would disturb you, make you restless, cause you to neglect your work, fill you with regret; and yet all too late—isn’t that it?” She laughed lightly and gave a lump of sugar to the cockatoo.
“You read me accurately. But why touch your words with satire?”
“I believe I read you better than you read me. I didn’t mean to be satirical. Don’t you know that what often seems irony directed towards others is in reality dealt out to ourselves? Such irony as was in my voice was for myself.”
“And why for yourself?” he asked quietly, his eyes full of interest. He was cutting the end of a fresh cigar. “Was it”—he was about to strike a match, but paused suddenly—“was it because you had thought the same thing?”
She looked for a moment as though she would read him through and through; as though, in spite of all their candour, there was some lingering uncertainty as to his perfect straightforwardness; then, as if satisfied, she said at last: “Yes, but with a difference. I have no doubt which memory it will be. You will not wish to be again on the plains of Nindobar.”
“And you,” he said musingly, “you will not wish me here?” There was no real vanity in the question. He was wondering how little we can be sure of what we shall feel to-morrow from what we feel to-day. Besides, he knew that a wise woman is wiser than a wise man.
“I really don’t think I shall care particularly. Probably, if we met again here, there would be some jar to our comradeship—I may call it that, I suppose?”
“Which is equivalent to saying that good-bye in most cases, and always in cases such as ours, is a little tragical, because we can never meet quite the same again.”
She bowed her head, but did not reply. Presently she glanced up at him kindly. “What would you give to have back the past you had before you lost your illusions, before you had—trouble?”
“I do not want it back. I am not really disillusionised. I think that we should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world. I believe in the world in spite—of trouble. You might have said trouble with a woman—I should not have minded.” He was smoking now, and the clouds twisted about his face so that only his eyes looked through earnestly. “A woman always makes laws from her personal experience. She has not the faculty of generalisation—I fancy that’s the word to use.”