"But," she said, and the word dropped from her like a stone that falls down a well....
"My dear," he said, at last, "I've thought of that. But since I left that dear, dusty little laboratory, and all those exquisite subtle things—I've lived. I've left that man seven long years behind me. Some other man must go on—I think some younger man—with the riddles I found to work on then. I've grown—into something different. It isn't how atoms swing with one another, or why they build themselves up so and not so, that matters any more to me. I've got you and all the world in which we live, and a new set of riddles filling my mind, how thought swings about thought, how one man attracts his fellows, how the waves of motive and conviction sweep through a crowd and all the little drifting crystallizations of spirit with spirit and all the repulsions and eddies and difficulties, that one can catch in that turbulent confusion. I want to do a new sort of work now altogether.... Life has swamped me once, but I don't think it will get me under again;—I want to study men."
He paused and she waited, with a face aglow.
"I want to go back to watch and think—and I suppose write. I believe I shall write criticism. But everything that matters is criticism!... I want to get into contact with the men who are thinking. I don't mean to meet them necessarily, but to get into the souls of their books. Every writer who has anything to say, every artist who matters, is the stronger for every man or woman who responds to him. That's the great work—the Reality. I want to become a part of this stuttering attempt to express, I want at least to resonate, even if I do not help.... And you with me, Marjorie—you with me! Everything I write I want you to see and think about. I want you to read as I read.... Now after so long, now that, now that we've begun to talk, you know, talk again——"
Something stopped his voice. Something choked them both into silence. He held out a lean hand, and she shuffled on her knees to take it....
"Don't please make me," she stumbled through her thoughts, "one of those little parasitic, parroting wives—don't pretend too much about me—because you want me with you——. Don't forget a woman isn't a man."
"Old Madge," he said, "you and I have got to march together. Didn't I love you from the first, from that time when I was a boy examiner and you were a candidate girl—because your mind was clear?"
"And we will go back," she whispered, "with a work——"
"With a purpose," he said.
She disengaged herself from his arm, and sat close to him upon the floor. "I think I can see what you will do," she said. She mused. "For the first time I begin to see things as they may be for us. I begin to see a life ahead. For the very first time."