"Richard! Richard!" Lady Calmady cried, "do you want to break my heart quite?"
"No," he answered, simply. "I'd infinitely rather not break your heart. I have no ambition to see my name in that devil's list except as an uncommonly ironical sort of second best. But then we must make some change, some radical change. At times, lately, I've felt as if I was a caged wild beast—blinded, its claws cut, the bars of its cage soldered and riveted, no hope of escape, and yet the vigour, the immense longing for freedom and activity, there all the while."
Richard stretched himself.
"Poor beast, poor beast, poor beast!" he said, shaking his head and smiling. "I tell you I get absurdly sentimental over it at times."
And then, happily, there came a momentary lapse in the entirety of his egoism. He turned on his side and took Lady Calmady's hand again, and fell to playing absently with her bracelets.
"You poor darling, how I torture you," he said. "And yet, now we've once broken the ice and begun talking of all this, we're bound to talk on to the finish—if finish there is. You see these few weeks in London—I've enjoyed them—but still they've made me understand, more than ever, all I've missed. Life calls, mother, do you see? And though the beast is blind, and his claws are cut, and his cage bolted, yet, when life calls, he must answer—must—or run mad—or die—do you see?"
"And you shall answer, my beloved. Never fear, you will answer," Katherine replied proudly.
Richard's hand closed hard upon hers.
"Thank you," he said. "You were made to be a mother of heroes, not of a useless log like me.—And that's just why I want to be good. And to be good I want a wife, that I may have that boy. I could keep straight for him, mother, though I'm afraid I can't keep straight for myself, and simply because it's right, much longer. I want him to have just all that I am denied. I want him to restore the balance, both for you and for me. I may have something of a career myself, perhaps, in politics or something. It's possible, but that will come later, if it comes at all. And then it would be for his sake. What I want first is the boy, to give me an object and keep up my pluck, and keep me steady. I, giving him life, shall find my life in him, be paid for my wretched circumscribed existence by his goodly and complete one. He may be clever or not—I'd rather, of course, he was not quite a dunce—but I really don't very much mind, so long as he isn't an outrageous fool, if he's only an entirely sound and healthy human animal."
Richard stretched himself upon the bed, straightened the sheet across his chest, and clasped his hands under his head again. The desolation had gone out of his eyes. He seemed to look afar into the future, and therein see manly satisfaction and content. His voice was vibrant, rising to a kind of chant.