Oh, youth! youth! You must each look back and see for yourselves, in the aft-light cast by later experience, the mountains and fiery ordeals you made for yourselves out of mole-hills in the matter of heart-break. We, whose hair is white, cannot help you, though we have gone before and know so well the cruel stretches on the road you travel.
Ernest waited for me to take the initiative, and as everything that rose to my lips seemed banal, we stood awkwardly silent till he was forced into saying—
"I'm afraid you are overdoing yourself. Can I not help you to your room? You will be ill."
"The only thing that would overdo me is that you should be upset about this. It must not make any difference."
"Difference between you and me?—nothing short of an earthquake could do that," he replied.
"I mean with Dawn. It must not make any difference with her. It was only a freak."
"Certainly; I would be a long time retaliating upon a lady, no matter what she did to me; but when—when—" (he could not bring himself to name it, it struck him as so disgraceful)—"she intimates to me, as plainly as was done to-night, that she disapproves of my presence in her house, well, a fellow would want pole-axing if he hadn't pride to take a hint like that."
"She did not mean anything. She will be more hurt than you are."
"Mean anything! Had it been a joke I could have managed to endure it, or an accident about which she would have worried, I would have been amused, but it was deliberate; and if it had been clean water—but ugh! it was greasy slop-water, to make it as bad as it could be; and if a man had done it—"
The muscles of his arm expanded under my interested touch as he made a fist of the strong brown hand.