She seemed pleading with him––it made him wince; she was calling forth his best to help her weakest.
“Your book”––Mary-Clare gripped that again––“your book is a beautiful, live thing––we must keep it so! Your man has grown and grown through every page until he quite naturally believed he was able to––to do more than any man can ever do! Why, this is your chance to be different, stronger.” The quick, panting words ran into each other and then Mary-Clare controlled them while, unheeded, the tears rolled down her cheeks. “You must let your woman act for herself! She, too, must learn and know. She made a horrible mistake from not knowing and seeing the first man; no love can help her by taking the solution from her. She must be free––free and begin again. If it is right–––”
“Yes, Mary-Clare. If it is right, what then?”
Everything seemed to wait upon the answer. The scurrying wood creatures and the dropping of dead leaves alone broke the silence. Slowly, like one coming into consciousness, Mary-Clare drew one hand from Northrup’s, wiped her eyes, and then––let it fall again into his!
“I can see clearer now,” she faltered. “Please, please try to understand. It is because love means so much to some women, that when they think it out with their women-minds they will be very careful of it. They will feel about it as men do about their honour. There must be times when love must stand aside if they want to keep it! I know how queer and crooked all this must sound, but men do not stop loving if their honour makes them turn from it. We are all, men and women, too, parts––we cannot act as if––oh! you do understand, I know you do, and some day you will go on with your beautiful book.”
“And the end of my book, Mary-Clare? There must be an end.”
“I do not know. I do not think a great big book ever ends any more than life ends.”
Northrup was swept from his hard-wrought position at this. The next wave of emotion might carry him higher, but for the moment he was drifting, drifting.
“You do not know life, nor men, nor women,” he said huskily and clutched her hands in his. “If life cheats and injures you, you have a right to snatch what joy you can. It’s not only what you do to love, but what you do to yourself, that counts. For real love can stand anything.”