“I have tried to read what thinkers say about it,” she added; “but they only confuse one the more. There is a Dr Wallace whom the papers speak of as an authority, and he has been writing a long article this very week—or else it is an interview—and he says that everything will be all right, that all the nice women will marry all the good men, and that the other kinds will die off immediately, and everybody will be oh, so happy—in a ‘regenerated society.’ That is another thing I wanted to ask you about. He speaks—they all speak—so confidently about this ‘regenerated society.’ Do you happen to know when it is to be?”
“The date has not been fixed, I believe,” I replied.
The early winter twilight had darkened the room, and the light from the grate glowed ruddily upon the girl’s face as she bent forward, her chin upon her clasped hands, looking into the fire.
“There is another date which remains undetermined,”’ I added, faltering not a little at heart, but keeping my tongue under fair control. “I should like to speak to you about it, if I may take off my lamb’s-wool wig and Santa Claus beard, and appear before you once more as a contemporary citizen. It is this, Ermie. I am not so very old, after all. There is only a shade over a dozen years between us—say a baker’s dozen. My habits—my personal qualities, tolerable and otherwise, are more or less known to you. I am prosperous enough, so far as this world’s goods go. But I am tired of living——”
I stopped short, and stared in turn blankly at the mock coals. A freezing thought had just thrust itself into the marrow of my brain. She would think that I was saying all this because her father had regained and augmented his fortune. I strove in a numb, puzzled way to retrace what I had just uttered—to see if the words offered any chance of getting away upon other ground—and could not remember at all.
“Tired of living,” I heard Ermyntrude echo. I saw her nod her head comprehendingly in the firelight. She sighed.
“Yes, except upon conditions,” I burst forth. “I weary of living alone. There hasn’t been a time for years when I didn’t long to tell you this—and most of all at Clacton, if I had known you were at Clacton. You have admitted yourself that nobody knew you were there.” The words came more easily now. “But always before I shrank from speaking. There was something about you too childlike, too innocent, too—too——”
“Too silly,” suggested Ermie, with an affable effect of helping me out.
Then she unlocked her fingers, and, still looking into the fire, stretched out a hand backward to me. “All the same,” she murmured, after a little, “it isn’t an answer to my question, you know.”
“But it is to mine!” I made glad response, “and in my question all the others are enwrapped—always have been, always will be. And, oh, darling one——”