"You will bore him to death then."
"I suppose I shall," replied Phebe, dejectedly. "I don't suppose any one living wants to be loved so much as I would want to love him. I couldn't be cool and deliberate and wise at loving as you would be. I should have to do it with my whole heart and just give myself up to it for good and all."
"That's the story-book way of loving," said Gerald. "I don't believe in it for real life. Blind adoration doesn't do either the lover or the loved any good. There should be sense in one's emotions as well as in one's opinions."
Phebe was silent a moment or two. "You are so self-possessed, and so self-controlled, Gerald," she said at last. "It must be very nice to have one's self so perfectly in command as you have. And yet I don't know. I think it would be rather nice too to find one's self suddenly under the power of some one a great deal better and stronger and wiser than one's self, who compelled one to love him, not because one would, but just because one could not help it."
The girls were alone in the sitting-room, Mrs. Lane having gone out to a neighbor's, taking Olly with her, and Miss Lydia not having yet appeared for her usual hour downstairs. It was a few days after the picnic, and was one of those suddenly cool August evenings that sometimes drop down so unexpectedly upon the summer heat, and a wood-fire lay upon the hearth ready to light at the invalid's coming. Phebe too sprang from the sofa as she spoke, as if her words had evoked too vivid a picture, and kneeling down by the hearth, applied a match. The bright flame leaped swiftly up and filled all the room with a flickering golden glow. Gerald turned in the window to watch it. How quickly it had flushed Phebe's cheeks, and how soft her eyes looked in its light!
"It's downright cruelty to spoil our first cool evening with a fire, Phebe, but I'll forgive you, it makes you look so pretty," she said, quite unconscious of her beauty as she stood against the dark background of the curtain in picturesque stateliness, her dress of soft cream-white cloth falling in clinging folds about her, and her clear pale face turned dreamily toward the light, which gleamed out in fitful reflection from the heavy gold ornaments at her throat and wrists.
"Ah, you do not see yourself!" murmured Phebe, looking adoringly back at her. "No one else could look pretty to you if you did."
"How foolish!" said Gerald, scornfully. "Pray don't let us begin bandying compliments back and forth. That's next worse to eternally discussing love. Why it is that two girls seem never able to talk together half an hour without lugging in that threadbare subject as if it were the one most important thing in the world, I don't understand."
"Well, isn't love the most important thing,—to women?" asked Phebe, sitting down on the floor to nurse the fire, her thin muslin making a little ripple of pretty lightness around her.
"No, it isn't," replied Gerald. "It may be to some few perhaps, but certainly not to all women. It isn't to me. It's one thing; not every thing; and not even the best thing. Knowledge is better, and goodness is better, and to come down to purely personal blessings, health is better, and so is common-sense better, and in the long run there are dozens of things infinitely better worth having and better worth aiming for. It's a good enough thing to have in addition, but as to its being the sum and substance, the Alpha and Omega, of any sensible woman's life, that's all foolishness. Let's have done with it and order in the lights. I want to get at Euclid again. It will never do for that conceited Yale brother of mine to get ahead of me. Shall I call to Nancy?"