"It is—partly. And yet I might do that. I did it once."
"You did, indeed. I can't conceive how you, being you, lived the life you did——"
"I owed it. It was the price of my freedom."
Her freedom! No wonder that she valued it, if she had paid that price!
She went on dreamily, as if speaking more to herself than him. "To have power over your life—to do what you like with it—take it up or throw it down, to fling it away if that seems the best thing to do. You're not fit to take up your life if you haven't the strength to put it down, too."
"Frida, if you were my wife you wouldn't have to put it down. I'm not asking you to give up the world for me; I'm not even asking you to give up one day of your life. Your life would be exactly what it is now—plus one thing. You'll say, 'What can I give you that you haven't got?' I can give you what you've never had. You don't know what a man's love is and can be; and you must own that without that knowledge your experience, even as experience, is not quite as complete as it might be."
The boat—the boat that was to take him to the shore—was getting nearer. It was his last chance. And while he staked everything on that chance, he thought of Frida as he had first seen her, as she sat tragically at the whist table at Coton Manor, dealing out the cards with deft and supple fingers.
Now she was dealing out his fate.
He remembered how she had said, "Mr. Durant wins because he doesn't care about the game." Because he cared—cared so supremely—was he going to lose?
There were so many things in Frida that he had not reckoned with. She was an extraordinary mixture of impulse and reserve, and she had astonished him more than once by her readiness to give herself away; but beyond a certain point—the point of view in fact—her self-possession was complete. Still, he left no argument untried, for there was no knowing—no knowing what undiscovered spring he might chance to touch in that rich and subtle nature.