“Diane, they want me to go back to the antarctic, and lately I’ve felt the deepest, the most unaccountable impulse to go; but there’s one thing that holds me, that would make me give anything up—I mean the hope of your caring enough to want me to stay!”
She turned slowly toward him.
“Would you think that it meant something quite different if I said that I wanted you to go? That I felt that the work should be finished, the victory won?”
He hesitated; his face blanched.
“You want me to go? You don’t care enough to want me to stay here—where you are?”
“I didn’t say that. I want you to go because there’s a great work to finish, because it seems to me like rounding out your career, winning the greatest victory. I—I don’t want to help a man falter by the way or step back. I know he would never have faltered—I mean Overton.”
He looked at her blankly.
“No, he would never have faltered, but—you know, I’ve told you, Diane—I’m not as great as he was. I suppose that’s the reason—the reason you can’t feel as I do, you can’t accept all that I have to give—my love for you?”
“I want to tell you the truth,” she replied, looking up at him with clear eyes. “You know how I’ve felt about Overton. I cared for him so much that it seemed to me I could never feel anything like that for any one else, but lately——”
“Yes?” he cried eagerly, bending toward her, his eyes searching her face.