He bowed again. “Oh, yes, I remember it all,” he said, soberly.
“I have come to feel so strongly upon that subject,” she explained. “It seems to me more important than all others combined. It is the last thing in the world that should be decided upon an impulse, or a passing fancy—yet that is just what happens all about us. The books are greatly to blame for that. They talk as if only boys and girls knew what love meant. They flatter the young people, and turn their empty heads, with the notion that their idlest inclinations are very probably sacred emotions—which they may trust to burn brightly in a pure flame all their lives. The innocent simpletons rush to light this penny dip that is warranted to blaze eternally, and in a week or a month they are in utter darkness. We trembled lest you, coming so suddenly into a new life, should meet with that misfortune.”
He smiled faintly at her. “You see, I have not,” he commented.
She regarded him thoughtfully. “It is impossible to make rules for others in these matters,” she observed, “but there is this thing to be said. True love must be built upon absolutely true friendship; there can be no other foundation for it You will often see two men who are fond of each other. They delight in being together. Very often you cannot imagine what is the tie between them—and they would not be able to tell you. They just like to be together—even though they may not speak for hours, and may be as different in temperament as chalk and cheese. That is the essence of friendship—and you cannot have love without it. The man and the woman must have the all-powerful sense of ideal companionship between them. They must be able to say with truth to themselves that the world will always be richer to them together than apart. There may be many other elements in love, but there can be no love at all without this element. But you wonder why I am saying all this to you.”
He made a deprecatory gesture of the hands. “I am always charmed when you talk to me. I have been remembering that dear home of yours, and how inexpressibly good you were to me. I prize that memory so fondly!”
She smiled with an approach to her old gaiety of manner. “You were like a son of our own to us. And so we think of you now—as if you were ours.”
“And with what munificence you have treated me!” he exclaimed, fervently.
“And why not? For whom else would we be laying up our money? Oh, there was no difference of opinion about that. Months ago it was decided that when you came into Caermere you should come into everything.”
“I feared that Emanuel would be angry—disappointed—at my not taking up his work—but truly I could not. It wouldn’t be easy to explain to you—but——”
“No—let us not go into reasons. He had no feeling about it whatever. How should he? It would have been as reasonable to be vexed because the lenses of his spectacles did not fit your eyes. And Emanuel is reasonableness itself. No—the experiment was quite personal to himself. Without him, it could not have gone on at all. It will not go on now, when he leaves it to others. We make some little pretense that it will—but we know in our hearts that it won’t. And there was a fatal fault in it. To begin with, that would have killed it sooner or later, in any case.”