“I hoped she was coming with us,” said Freda.
“She doesn’t want to come with me,” answered Gregory, “and that has hurt me for a long time, it seems to me, although perhaps it is only weeks. But it may be just as well. For I could never make her happy.”
“Would it be so hard?”
“I could never make any woman happy,” said Gregory with extraordinary violence. “Happiness is a state of sloth. But I could live through ecstasy and through pain with some one who was not afraid. For this serene stagnancy which seems to be the end-all of most people, I’m no good. I couldn’t do it, that’s all.”
His head was in the air and he looked, thought Freda, as if he would be extremely likely to forget about any woman or anything else and go sailing off in some fantasy of his own, at any time. She remembered him as he had been, despondent, when she had first met him, last night full of blazing enthusiasms, to-night blithely independent. It delighted her. She had never before met a person who adjusted to no routine.
“Let’s walk in peace and watch the clouds and I’ll tell you what an old Irish poet said of them.”
He could see her chin lift as she listened.
“To have in your mind such a wealth of beauty—what it must mean—to feel that things do not starve within you for lack of utterance—” Her voice was blurred into appreciations.
“Why let them starve?” asked Gregory.
“Perhaps because practical meat-and-drink body needs always claim the nourishment the things of your mind need—and you let the mind go hungry.”