She rose and stood, regarding him with a twisted smile, affectionate and pitying. "I think that you are a fearfully selfish man—to quote Stevenson, quoted by Henley, 'an unconscious, easy, selfish person.' And I think that, of your own brand, you have grit and pluck and stamina for twenty men. There's no malice or envy in you, and you're intellectually honest, and you can be the best company in the world. I am very fond of you."
"Aren't you the selfish person not to be willing to go to Bogotá?"
"Perhaps—perhaps—" said Hagar Ashendyne, "but I am not willing."
"What is it that you do want?"
"That is the first time you have asked me that.... Wandering is good, but it is not good for all of life. I want to return to my own country and to live there. I want to grow in my native forest and serve in my own place."
"To live at Gilead Balm with Bob and Serena?"
"No; I do not mean that precisely." Hagar pushed back her heavy hair. "I haven't thought it out perfectly. But it has grown to be wrong to me, personally, to wander, wander forever like this—irresponsible, brushing life with moth wings.... If I saw any end to it ... but I do not—"
"And you wish to cut the painter? This comes," said Medway, "of the damned modern independence of women. If you couldn't write—couldn't earn—you'd trot along quietly enough! The pivotal mistake was letting women learn the alphabet."
"I could always have taken a position as housemaid," said Hagar serenely. "You can't make me angry, and so get the best of me. And you like me better, knowing the alphabet, and there's no use in your denying it.... If only you would conceive that it were possible for you to return to America, to take a house, to live there. And still you could travel—sometimes with me, sometimes without me—travel often if you pleased and far and wide.... Would it be so distasteful?"
"Profoundly so," said Medway. "It is idle to talk of it. I should be bored to extinction.—What is your alternative?"