“Well, what shall we do? Don't make me harden my heart before it has had time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies a little time to ripen.”
“But you have lived in New York. Did you find it such a strain on your sympathies?”
“I was a visitor; and a girl is not expected to have sympathies. But to begin our home there: we should have to strike a note of some sort. How if my note should jar with yours? Paul, dear, it isn't nice to have convictions when one is young and going to be married. You know it isn't. It's not poetic, and it's not polite, and it's a dreadful bore!”
The altruist and lover winced at this. Allowing for exaggeration, which was the life of speech with her, he knew that Moya was giving him a bit of her true self, that changeful, changeless self which goes behind all law and “follows joy and only joy.” Her voice dropped into its sweetest tones of intimacy.
“Why need we live in a crowd? Why must we be pressed upon with all this fuss and doing? Doing, doing! We are not ready to do anything yet. Every day must have its dawn;—and I don't see my way yet; I'm hardly awake!”
“Darling, hush! You must not say such things to me. For you only to look at me like that is the most terrible temptation of my life. You make me forget everything a man is bound—that I of all men am bound to remember.”
“Then I will keep on looking! Behold, I am Happiness, Selfishness, if you like! I have come to stay. No, really, it's not nice of you to act as if you were under higher orders. You are under my orders. What right have we to choose each other if we are not to be better to each other than to any one else?—if our lives belong to any one who needs us, or our time and money, more than we need it ourselves? Why did you choose me? Why not somebody pathetic—one of your Poor Things; or else save yourself whole for all the Poor Things?”
“Now you are 'talking for victory,'” he smiled. “You don't believe we must be as consistent as all that. Hearts don't have to be coddled like pears picked for market. But I'm not preaching to you. The heavens forbid! I'm trying to explain. You don't think this whole thing with me is a pose? I know I'm a bore with my convictions; but how do we come by such things?”
“Ah! How do I come not to have any, or to want any?” she rejoined.
“Once for all, let me tell you how I came by mine. Then you will know just where and how those cries for help take hold on me.”