The man's voice wavered for a moment; then it grew stronger. “I don't quite see how the world can ever seem a beautiful place after to-night. The sky may be very blue indeed, but the man whose eyes ache will not look up to see it. The birds may sing gloriously in the trees, but the man whose heart is an empty house will not care at all.”
Randal stopped and looked down at the woman. He noticed how very soft and heavy her brown hair was, and how delicate and slender her hands were. He noted vaguely, too, the artistic effect of the folds of her gown and the shadows on her face.
“Marion,” he said, “If I did not love you better than any other thing in the world, I would not be urging these bitter arguments against my own happiness. I would not be so desperately anxious about your welfare. I should not be so fearful of the future. I should take the chance without the hesitation of a moment. But the very depth of my love makes me a coward. I could not bear to see you subject to all the evil things that come with poverty. I know what a frightful plight it is—how it crushes out the sweetness and the nobility of one's life, how it squeezes the heart, day after day, until it finally becomes a dry husk in one's breast.”
Randal's voice was now thick with emotion. “Marion,” he said, “do you hear me? Do you believe me?”
The woman's hands tightened on the great arms of the chair, and for a moment she was silent; then she began to speak, slowly and distinctly.
“I do not know.” she said. “I must have time to think. Yet I have believed you all these years. I must believe you now. Yes, I do believe you now. But you are wrong, frightfully wrong. You forget that a woman is a human being with a heart. You think I am afraid of the world, afraid of poverty, afraid of life as God makes it, as God wills it; that I am a fragile something that the rain and the sunlight would ruin if it touched; that I am a something more or less than you, a something that requires ease and luxury and all the gilded stage-setting of wealth—and you are wrong. If I love you, of what value to me are all those other things without you? If I love you, it is not all these things I want—it is you. I ask you to answer this, and by what is true in your heart, know what is true in mine: Would you be happy with all that wealth can give you and without me?”
“No,” said the man, “not after to-night. No.”
“No more would I,” added the woman.
The heart, as it is said, speaks clearer to the heart when tongues are silent, and it is said that grief and happiness when riding high in their meridian have no need for the cumbrous medium of language.
After a long silence, Miss Lanmar began again. “Men cannot understand,” she said; “a woman's heart is so miserably strange. Things either slip around it, leaving no mark at all, or they sink in and become a very part of the woman's heart itself. There is no middle ground; no half joy; no middle hurt. So it comes about that if one's image creeps into her heart, it must remain. True, the world may never know; the world is very stupid. But for all that, the woman's heart will hold its tenant, and when she is alone or in the dark, she will know and feel its presence. It may be that the woman will pray to be rid of the evil thing, or it may be that she will pray to hold it always as a gift of good, but be that as it happens, the woman's heart will remain forever helpless to evict its tenant.