“But it is the class which prefers to help itself,” she explained quietly. “I see no way in which you could ‘help’ them, as you call it. They don’t want any help. Men in their position might take tips, but these girls won’t.” As he received the rebuff in silence, she changed the subject. “I am meeting now some other young women who would interest you. They are doing newspaper work—and doing it on its merits, too, and not by the favoritism of editors and proprietors—and one or two evenings a week we all get together at my office and talk things over. Sometimes there are as many as twenty of us, including my girls. In a year or two, perhaps it will run to a club-room of our own. I don’t know that I told you—I am getting into newspaper work myself. If I saw how to combine it with my office business, I could have a place on a regular daily staff. I’m puzzling a good deal to find some way of making the two things go together.”
“Oh, I envy you!” broke in Christian, impulsively. “You have work to do! You are interested in your work! You find in it not only occupation, but the opportunities of being useful to others, and of making your life, and other people’s lives, worth living. But think of me! I have nothing in the wide world to do, except wait for a very strong old man to die. And when he dies, then still I have nothing to do worth doing. Don’t you see that it is the most miserable of existences? I am filled with disgust for it. I cannot bear it another day. And that is what I was going to tell you. I have decided to leave it all—and go away.”
Frances paused for a moment to scrutinize, with slightly narrowed eyes, the excited face he turned to her. “How will going away improve matters?” she asked him, upon reflection.
He put out his lips, and shrugged his shoulders. “At least I shall be a free man,” he affirmed.
Unconsciously she imitated his gesture in turn: “It does not follow that a deserter is necessarily a free man.”
He pushed and winced visibly under the words, and turned away biting his lips. Then, the vexation clearing from his face, he wheeled again, and regarded her with calm gravity.
“There is no one else who could say that to me and not injure me,” he answered, simply. “But that is the characteristic of you—when you say such a thing to me, then it becomes a thing that should have been said. Yet perhaps it is not the final word, after all. Ask yourself what it is that I am deserting! Consider whether I should give up or gain something. Here in England it is possible for me to be one of two things—the conventional person of position like all the others, or the exceptional kind of being which Emanuel desires to make of me. I have been at school for half a year learning what it is that society in general expects a man in my situation to do. Now that I have learned it, frankly it makes me sick at heart. But then I have been at another school for a month, observing and studying what it is that Emanuel wishes me to undertake. We have agreed that that is not to be thought of, either. Then what am I to do?”
“But how does running away solve the difficulty?” She put the question to him with gentle persistency.
“Ah, but, you see,” he rejoined, argumentatively, “it is not alone a moral difficulty. There are practical questions, too. When I announce to Emanuel that I reject his plans for my future, then I am left to myself to be that most ridiculous of objects—a man with a great station and no money to keep it up. That is what I must be here in England. But in other countries, that will not be the case. There will always be enough money for me to live like a prince upon—so long as I travel about, in my own yacht if I like, or reside simply and happily in the beautiful places of the earth, here and there, as the fancy possesses me. Thus I can put to use the prestige of my title, when it is of advantage to do so—but only in so far as it is needful at the moment—and at the same time it does not become a burden to me in any degree. Now think carefully of this—is it not the wisest course for me?” She seemed not to pause for thought at all. “Oh, that depends upon how you define wisdom,” she replied, promptly. “There is the wisdom of the serpent, but fortunately there are many other kinds. No, I must say, you haven’t convinced me in the least. However, you mustn’t think that is of importance. You are under no obligation to convince me, surely!”
“Ah, but that is everything to me,” he insisted. “There are reasons—which I wish to explain to you.”