"Yes," said the girl with breathless admiration and approval. "And are they finished now?"
"Confound the poems!" cried Adrian with an amazed, remorseful laugh. A stronger word had been on his lips. "Don't talk of them, Barbara! To think that I neglected you while I was polishing those idiotic rhymes, and that you think it was all right and proper! Oh, my dear, if you tried for a week you couldn't make me feel smaller! If—if anything had happened to you, and I had been left with my trumpery verses—"
"You shall not call them that! Don't talk so!"
"Well, suppose you had got tired of waiting, and had come across some better fellow. There was time enough, and it would have served me right."
"I don't know about serving you right, but there wouldn't have been time for me to get tired of waiting," said Barbara, and added more softly, "not if it had been all my life."
"Listen to that!" Adrian answered, leaning backward, with his elbows on the gate. "All her life—for me!"
His quick fancy sketched that life: first the passionate eagerness, throbbing, hoping, trusting, despairing; then submission to the inevitable, the gradual extinction of expectation as time went on; and finally the dimness and placidity of old age, satisfied to worship a pathetic memory. Hardly love, rather love's ghost, that shadowy sentiment, cut off from the strong actual existence of men and women, and thinly nourished on recollections, and fragments of mild verse. Scarlett turned away, as from a book of dried flowers, to Barbara.
"What did you think of me?" he said, still dwelling on the same thought. "Never one word!"
"Well, I felt as if there were a word—at least, a kind of a word—once," she said. "I went with Louisa to the dentist last February—it was Valentine's Day—she wanted a tooth taken out. There were some books and papers lying about in the waiting-room. One of them was an old Christmas number, with something of yours in it. Do you remember?"
"N—no," said Scarlett doubtfully.