“I can never look on marriage again as I used to,” she ventured. “Most of the good things of life have been spoiled for me.”
“I can’t agree to that: you are less than thirty, which isn’t the age at which we can afford to haul down the flag. If I’d subsided at thirty,—had concluded that the world would never listen to my little tin horn,—I should have missed most of the joy of life. And Marian at twenty-two mustn’t be allowed to say that the world at best is a dreary place. She mustn’t be allowed to form foolish opinions of life and destiny and call to the stage-hands to drop the curtain the first time some actor misses his cue. And do you know,” he continued with the humor glinting through his glasses, “that girl had the bad manners to tell me to my face only a few days ago that there was no substance to all our poetizing—that the romance had been trampled out of life! To think of that—at twenty-two or thirty!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Redfield, a little defiantly, “you must remember that I’ve tried poetry and romance.”
It was clear from her tone that she thought this scored heavily on her side, and offset any blame that might attach to her in his mind. She was surprised by the quickness with which he retorted.
This was rather discouraging when she had been at such pains to tell him the truth; when she had bared her soul to him. She felt that it was unchivalrous for him to question her fairness when she had been so frank.
“You can hardly say,” he went on, “that you made much of a trial of romance when you dropped it at the first sign of trouble. Please don’t misunderstand me. That letter you wrote me during your honeymoon from this very house was in a sense the declaration of a faith. You meant to live by it always; and if no troubles had ever come it would have been perfectly satisfactory—no doubts, no questions! You were like a mariner who doesn’t question his charts when the sea is calm; but who begins to doubt them when he hears the breakers roaring on hidden reefs. Ideals are no good if we haven’t a tolerably strong faith in them. I’m going to tell you something that may surprise you. You and Miles have been an ideal of mine. Not only was your house with its pretty garden and the hollyhocks a refuge, but it was one of my chief inspirations. A good many of the best things I’ve written came out of that little establishment. I was astonished the other day, in looking over my work of the past half-dozen years, to find how much of you and Miles there is in it. And now I feel that I ought to modify those things—stick in footnotes to say that the ideal home—the ideal of happiness I had derived from you—was all a fraud. Just think how that would look: an asterisk tacked to the end of every stanza, leading the eye down to an admission that my statements were not true, only poetry, romance, a flimsy invention which no one need be deceived by!”
“I hope,” she said despairingly, “that I haven’t lost everything! I’ve got to hold on to something for Marjorie’s sake!”
“But Miles,” he persisted, “what about him!”
“That isn’t kind or fair,” she replied, at the point of tears again. “If I’ve lost my ideals he’s responsible! He’s thrown away all of his own!”