“It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love as he is,” Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy stung him hard.
“What do you mean?”
“Woman reverses creation. She is a sublimated particle of a man, and she builds a god from her own superstructure, and clothes him with any image whom she chooses. She chose yours. Live up to her thought of you, if you can.”
Burr dropped his cousin's hand, and surveyed him with that impatient wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic speech. “There's no question of my living up to the thought of any woman's but my wife's,” he said, bitterly, and turned away.
“There's no knowing to what stature even a Dorothy Fair may raise a man in her mind. You may not be able to grow to that.”
“It is all I shall attempt.”
Then Lot spoke again, in that short-breathed voice of his, straining between the syllables. “Be sure—that you do—what—you will not—regret. Honor is not—always what we—think it.”
“I have my own conception of it at least, and that I live up to. 'Tis high time,” said Burr, with a kind of proud scorn of himself in his voice.
“Madelon Hautville—loves—you.”
“She does not, after all this.”