"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.
I ordered a cigar and a fine champagne. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.
"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be hurt—he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor—of anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"
"You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.
"Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost."
"But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you'd only take a real rest——"
"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
"To sea," she repeated; "to sea. . . . As if the sea itself knew rest!—Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home."
"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!"