“So that we should be near you? I should have loved that, of course; but we’ll come back. I don’t want him in politics, ever!”
“And why not, miss? If it’s good enough for your dad, it should be good enough for your husband, eh?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think I can make you understand. You’re—you’re different!”
“Humph! Not so valuable, perhaps?”
She laughed softly; then her face sobered.
“You’ve stood like granite, papa, in the midst of all the storm. You were made to be among the captains and the shouting. It’s fine—it has been fine to see you. I’ve always been proud of you, and I’ve heard men say that they were proud of you. Don’t you remember Governor Belt? He told me that you were a wonder, that not a muckraker living could fling ill-report at you! But Arthur? It seems to me that as he stands to-day—young and unsoiled and on the verge of great adventure—he’s at his best; he’ll be always at his best. If you pull him back into the turmoil of the city and State, fling him into politics, he won’t be the same. He won’t stand as you do, like a rock; he would bend and yield. It might spoil him, spoil the fineness in him.”
“My child, if he’s so brittle, life will break him, and he won’t be worth the breaking!”
“I don’t mean just that. I mean that I want to keep the fineness in him, to see him follow the shining trail. If it wasn’t for the fineness in him I couldn’t love him, papa, and if I didn’t believe I loved him I wouldn’t marry him.”
“That’s your test, I know.” The judge leaned back, pulling at his pipe, amused at Diane’s view, which seemed to him to be merely that of untried girlhood. “There’s been many a marriage without love, my dear, that’s turned out well enough.”