"It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you," he said. "Have you made it possible for me to be anything else?"
"Then I'll make it possible for you now: to begin, I am too old to be called to account for my actions—except by those who have the right."
"You mean, that I have no right—after what has passed—"
"Nothing has passed between us!"
"Marguerite," he said, "do you mean that you do not love me?"
"Can you not see?"
She was standing on the steps above him. The many-fluted parasol with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder. Her face in the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety. Her eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness.
"I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me," he said, laughing pitifully. His big mouth twitched and his love had come back into his eyes quickly enough.
"Let me tell you how I know," she said, with more kindness. "If I loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this way. I could not tell you you are not a man. Everything in me would go down before you. You could do with my life what you pleased. No one in comparison with you would mean anything to me—not even mamma. As long as I was with you, I should never wish to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken. If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the dearer to me—if you only loved me, only loved me!"
Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be children? Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt dimly to fix the time. "It probably occurred on that day," we declare; "it may have taken place during that night. It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child. Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the passions parts the two eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which was its parent is dead.