“Ah! that is why you asked them. Your father knows that in a young country events move by jerks—that the man who is nobody to-day may be somebody to-morrow. The mammon of unrighteousness, Wanda.”
“Yes.”
“And you are above that sort of thing.”
“I am not above anything that they deem necessary for the good of Poland,” she answered, gravely. “They give everything. I have not much to give, you see.”
“I suppose you have what every woman has—to sacrifice upon some altar or another—your happiness!”
Wanda shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. She glanced across at him. He knew something. But he had learned nothing from Cartoner. Of that, at least, she was sure.
“Happiness, or a hope of happiness,” he went on, reflectively. “Perhaps one is as valuable as the other. Perhaps they are the same thing. If you gain a happiness you lose a hope, remember that. It is not always remembered by women, and very seldom by men.”
“Is it so precious? It is common enough, at all events.”
“What is common enough?” he asked, absent-mindedly.
“Hope.”