He waited for Jeanne, and saw that her fingers were nervously twisting a bit of ribbon in her lap.
"Of course, that is uninteresting," she continued. "You can almost guess the rest. We have lived here—alone. Not one of us has ever felt the desire to leave this little world of ours. It is curious—you may scarcely believe what I say—but it is true that we look out upon your big world and laugh at it and dislike it. I guess—that I have been taught to hate it—since I can remember."
There was a little tremble in Jeanne's voice, an instant's quivering of her chin. Philip looked from her face into the fire, and stared hard, choking back words which were ready to burst from his lips. In place of them he said, with a touch of bitterness in his voice:
"And I have grown to hate my world, Jeanne. It has compelled me to hate it. That is why I spoke to you that night on the cliff at Churchill."
"I have sometimes thought that I have been very wrong," said the girl. "I have never seen this other world. I know nothing of it, except as I have been taught. I have no right to hate it, and yet I do. I have never wanted to see it. I have never cared to know the people who lived in it. I wish that I could understand, but I cannot; except that father has made for us, for Pierre and Otille and me, this little world at Fort o' God, and has taught us to fear the other. I know that there is no other man in the whole world like my father, and that what he has done must be best. It is his pride that we bring your world to our doors, but that we never go to it; he says that we know more about that world than the people who live there, which of course cannot be so. And so we have grown up amid the old memories, the pictures, and the dead romances of Fort o' God. We have taken pleasure in living as we do—in making for ourselves our own little social codes, our childish aristocracy, our make-believe world. It is the spirit of Fort o' God that lives with us, and makes us content; the shadow-faces of men and women who once filled these rooms with life and pleasure, and whose memory seems to have passed into our keeping alone. I know them all; many of their names, all of their faces. I have a daguerreotype of Camille Poitiers, and she must have been very beautiful. There are the tiniest slippers in the world in her chest, and ribbons like those which are tied about the pistols. There is a painting of D'Arcy in your room. It is the picture next to the one that has its face turned to the wall."
She rose to her feet, and Philip stood beside her. There was a mist in her eyes as she held out her hand to him.
"I—I—would like to have you—see that picture," she whispered.
Philip could not speak. He held the hand Jeanne had given him as they passed through the long, dimly lighted halls. At the open door to his room they stopped, and he could feel Jeanne trembling.
"You will tell me—the truth?" she begged, like a child. "You will tell me what you think—of the picture?"
"Yes."