"But I don't love him."
"Yes, you do. When you returned Osborne Lawson's ring you quite plainly said so."
She burned with a new flame with this confession; but she protested, "Let us be sensible! Let us argue!"
"You cannot argue with love."
"I am not a child to be carried away by a momentary gust of emotion. See how impossible it is for me to share his work—his austere life."
And here entered the far-reaching question of the life and death of a race. In a most disturbing measure this obscure young soldier represented a view of life—of civilization antagonistic to her faith, and in stern opposition to the teachings of her father. In a subtle fashion he had warped the word duty from its martial significance to a place in a lofty philosophy whose tenets were only just beginning to unfold their inner meaning to her.
Was it not true that she was less sympathetic with the poor brown peoples of the earth than with the animals? "How can you be contemptuous of God's children, whom the physical universe has colored brown or black or yellow—you, who are indignant when a beast is overburdened? If we repudiate and condemn to death those who do not please us, who will live?"
She felt in herself some singular commotion. Conceptions, hitherto mere shells of thought, became infilled with passion; and pity, hitherto a feeble sentiment with her, expanded into an emotion which shook her, filled her throat with sobs, discrediting her old self with her new self till the thought of her mean and selfish art brought shame. How small it all was, how trivial, beside the consciousness of duty well done, measured against a life of self-sacrifice, such as that suggested by this man, whose eyes sought her in worship!
Could there be any greater happiness than to stand by his side, helping to render a dying, captive race happier—healthier? Could her great wealth be put to better use than this of teaching two hundred thousand red people how to meet and adjust themselves to the white man's way of life? Their rags, their squalor, their ignorance were more deeply depressing to her lover than the poverty of the slums, for the Tetongs had been free and joyous hunters. Their condition was a tragic debasement. She began to feel the arguments of the Indian helpers. Their words were no longer dead things; they had become electric nodes; they moved her, set her blood aflame, and she clinched her hands and said: "I will help him do this great work!"