“Unhappy wretch! Why?”
“Oh, because!”—she hesitated, then laughed—“because he would be always about! He’d have the right to go with me everywhere—such a bore!”
“Love——” began Dimitrius, sententiously.
“Love!” She flashed a look of utter scorn upon him. “You don’t believe in it—neither do I! What have we to do with love?”
“Nothing!” he agreed, quietly. “But—you are really rewarding my studies, Diana! You are growing very pretty!”
She turned from him with a gesture of offended impatience and walked on. He caught up to her.
“You don’t like my telling you that?” he said.
“No. Because the ‘prettiness’ is your forced product. It’s not my natural output.”
He seized her hand somewhat roughly and held it as in a vice.
“You talk foolishly!” he said, in a low, stern voice. “My ‘forced product’ as you call it, is not mine, except in so far that I have found and made use of the forces of regenerative life which are in God’s life and air and which enter into the work of all creation. Your ‘prettiness’ is God’s work!—lift up your eyes to the Almighty Power which ‘maketh all things new!’”