“I know that’s the thing you couldn’t possibly forgive, and yet that seems the slightest thing of all to me. You can’t know what it is to be humbled, and so many innocent pleasures taken away from you. When Fectnor came back ... oh, it seemed to me that life itself mocked me and warned me coldly that I needn’t expect to be any other than the old Sylvia, clear to the end. I had begun to have a little pride, and to have foolish dreams. And then I went back to my father’s house. It wasn’t my father; it wasn’t even Fectnor. It was Life itself whipping me back into my place again.
“... And then Runyon came. He meant pleasure to me—nothing more. He seemed such a gay, shining creature!” She looked at him in the agony of utter despair. “I know how it appears to you; but if you could only see how it seemed to me!”
“I’m trying,” said Harboro, unmoved.
“If I’d been a little field of grass for the sheep to graze on, do you suppose I shouldn’t have been happy if the birds passed by, or that I shouldn’t have been ready for the sheep when they came? If I’d been a little pool in the desert, do you suppose I wouldn’t have been happier for the sunlight, and just as ready for the rains when they came?”
He frowned. “But you’re neither grass nor water,” he said.
“Ah, I think I am just that—grass and water. I think that is what we all are—with something of mystery added.”
He seized upon that one tangible thought. “There you have it, that something of mystery,” he said. “That’s the thing that makes the world move—that keeps people clean.”
“Yes,” she conceded dully, “or makes people set up standards of their own and compel other people to accept them whether they understand them or believe in them or not.”
When he again regarded her with dark disapproval she went on:
“What I wanted to tell you, Harboro, is that my heart has been like a brimming cup for you always. It was only that which ran over that I gave to another. Runyon never could have robbed the cup—a thousand Runyons couldn’t. He was only like a flower to wear in my hair, a ribbon to put on for an outing. But you ... you were the hearth for me to sit down before at night, a wall to keep the wind away. What was it you said once about a man and woman becoming one? You have been my very body to me, Harboro; and any other could only have been a friendly wind to stir me for a moment and then pass on.”