At that moment it became a conviction to Mark that Betty loved an ideal husband, who would fall from the pinnacle on which she had perched him. A feeling of pleasure at this impending catastrophe almost turned him sick. Then, very slowly, he resolved that the powers within him should be devoted to the preservation of an ideal, so vital to the welfare of the woman he loved. Betty began to speak of his literary work.
"When I read your book," she said, "I had an intuition that one day you would write a play."
Mark quoted Tommy Greatorex. "That's an easy job."
"I have a motif for you. The emotional treatment of religion. Look at the success of this new book, Robert Elsmere! The same success awaits the dramatist who can use like material. I should make the principal character a woman of passion with a strong sense of religion."
"A sinner?"
"Yes. It seems to me that sinners on the stage have great opportunities. The world must listen to what they have to say. In real life the good people do all the talking, the moral talking, I mean; an honest sinner holds his or her tongue. It's such a pity, for I'm sure your honest sinner loathes his sin. In my drama the sinner is saved, because the sense of what she has suffered, her personal experience of the horror and misery of sin, make for her salvation."
"The right man could do something with it, no doubt."
"Why not you, Mark?"
He fell into a reverie, staring into the fire. Betty perceived that he had wandered out of the world of speech into the suburbs of silence, where visions of what might have been come and go. Presently he said abruptly:
"Shall we walk?"