“That doesn’t seem very clear,” she said in answer. “Since I came out here I’ve been a sort of riverine missionary, an apostle with no followers, a reformer with a plan of salvation no one will accept.”
“We are not stronger than tradition, than the long custom of ages bred in the bone and practised by the flesh. You cannot change a people by firmans; you must educate them. Meanwhile, things go on pretty much the same. You are a generation before your time. It is a pity, for you have saddened your youth, and you may never live to see accomplished what you have toiled for.”
“Oh, as to that—as to that...” She smoothed back her hair lightly, and her eyes wandered over the distant hills-mauve and saffron and opal, and tender with the mist of evening. “What does it matter!” she added. “There are a hundred ways to live, a hundred things to which one might devote one’s life. And as the years went on we’d realise how every form of success was offset by something undone in another direction, something which would have given us joy and memory and content—so it seems. But—but we can only really work out one dream, and it is the working out—a little or a great distance—which satisfies. I have no sympathy with those who, living out their dreams, turn regretfully to another course or another aim, and wonder-wonder, if a mistake hasn’t been made. Nothing is a mistake which comes of a good aim, of the desire for wrongs righted, the crooked places made straight. Nothing matters so that the dream was a good one and the heart approves and the eyes see far.”
She spoke as though herself in a dream, her look intent on the glowing distance, as though unconscious of his presence.
“It’s good to have lived among mountains and climbed them when you were young. It gives you bigger ideas of things. You could see a long way with the sun behind you, from Skaw Fell.”
He spoke in a low voice, and her eyes drew back from the distance and turned on him. She smiled.
“I don’t know. I suppose it gives one proportion, though I’ve been told by Donovan Pasha and the Consul that I have no sense of proportion. What difference does it make? It is the metier of some people of this world to tell the truth, letting it fall as it will, and offend where it will, to be in a little unjust maybe, measure wrongly here and there, lest the day pass and nothing be done. It is for the world to correct, to adjust, to organise, to regulate the working of the truth. One person cannot do all.”
Every minute made him more and more regretful, while it deepened his feelings for her. He saw how far removed was her mind from the sordid views of things, and how sincere a philosophy governed her actions and her mission.
He was about to speak, but she continued: “I suppose I’ve done unwise things from a worldly, a diplomatic, and a political point of view. I’ve—I’ve broken my heart on the rock of the impossible, so my father says.... But, no, I haven’t broken my heart. I have only given it a little too much hope sometimes, too much disappointment at others. In any case—can one be pardoned for quoting poetry in these days? I don’t know, I’ve been so long out of the world—
‘Bruised hearts when all is ended,
Bear the better all after-stings;
Broken once, the citadel mended
Standeth through all things.’