“If my wishing could bring anything good to you, you would have everything in the world.”
His voice was not entirely steady, but his eyes smiled into hers.
“Am I—are we going to lose you soon?”
“I shall finish my training. I made that a condition.”
Then, in a burst of confidence:—
“I know so little, K., and he knows so much! I am going to read and study, so that he can talk to me about his work. That's what marriage ought to be, a sort of partnership. Don't you think so?”
K. nodded. His mind refused to go forward to the unthinkable future. Instead, he was looking back—back to those days when he had hoped sometime to have a wife to talk to about his work, that beloved work that was no longer his. And, finding it agonizing, as indeed all thought was that summer night, he dwelt for a moment on that evening, a year before, when in the same June moonlight, he had come up the Street and had seen Sidney where she was now, with the tree shadows playing over her.
Even that first evening he had been jealous.
It had been Joe then. Now it was another and older man, daring, intelligent, unscrupulous. And this time he had lost her absolutely, lost her without a struggle to keep her. His only struggle had been with himself, to remember that he had nothing to offer but failure.
“Do you know,” said Sidney suddenly, “that it is almost a year since that night you came up the Street, and I was here on the steps?”