“Little heretic!” he mocked, “little revolutionist! A party is a great machine; we can’t do without it!”
She shook her head vehemently. “The children of Israel thought they couldn’t do without the golden calf! You were not so strong a party man five years ago, do you remember?”
He looked at her quickly. “Do you?”
“I read your speeches,” she confessed with charming ingenuousness, her eyes kindling with emotion; “I read the first speech they ever printed in the newspapers here. I’ve wanted to tell you how beautiful I thought it, how eloquent!”
He regarded her a moment in silence; he felt suddenly that there had always been a link between them, that across space and time he had spoken not to the public but to her, and even been understood by her; that the virgin whiteness of her young soul had received the inscription of his mind. Then he was as suddenly and vividly conscious of his folly, his egotism, his unworthiness! She was too lovely and too innocent to have received the impression of his spirit; and he—the thought of his careless life, his worship at Margaret’s shrine, the strength of the old fetters which bound him, made him suddenly humble. And then, the beauty of her smile, the warm sympathy of her temperament created an angry impatience of such restrictions; with characteristic scorn of conventionalities he thrust them aside. The perfect innocence and spontaneity of her praise and appreciation was the most subtle of all flattery, and he possessed the temperament of genius which is, at one moment, above the consideration of either praise or blame and the next quivers with sensibility at the breath of either. He returned her shy but glowing look with one of unusual humility. “I feel as if I didn’t deserve it,” he said gently; “it is an exquisite happiness to be praised by you!”
She smiled. “And I feel ashamed to have set myself up as a judge,” she replied quickly, “but it was because—because I didn’t want you to fall below your own standard! You see what it is to have a record of great achievements.”
“Hereafter I shall only seek to deserve your praise,” he rejoined, “but I feel myself a sublime egoist; I’ve sat here talking of myself, of my work, and meanwhile I remember that my aunt told me of your voice. Why do you never sing for me?”
“Because you have never asked me,” she replied simply, with an involuntary smile.
Fox leaned toward her with an eloquent gesture of appeal. “Did I deserve that? Am I such a miserable egoist?” he exclaimed, and then: “I ask you now.”
Rose was entirely unaffected, and she went at once to the piano in the room beyond, and seating herself began to play the first soft notes of a prelude. Fox had followed her and took his place near the instrument, again observing her with keen appreciation; her sweetness, her whiteness of soul had taken possession of his imagination with a force which he had supposed, until this moment, impossible. For, after one bitter and humiliating experience in the drama of love and passion, he had withdrawn with seared sensibilities, and assuming a new attitude had regarded women as a detached spectator, fancying that he possessed a high degree of eclecticism in comparing the emotional phases of their existence which should be henceforth quite apart from his; love and marriage were mere episodes in a man’s life, and feeling no need of assuming either the duties or the responsibilities of the latter state he had not seriously contemplated the former as anything but a remote possibility. Besides, in a curious way, his life seemed to be linked with Margaret White’s; she continued to make claims upon him, to tacitly presuppose his devotion, and he had been too uncertain of himself, too indolent, too easily drifting with the tide to make any effort to free himself from the shackles of that old love affair. But all these things slipped out of mind as he sat listening to Rose’s song.