The other shook her head.
“And what about love? Are you going through life without the one thing that makes it bearable?”
“I would not purchase it at such a cost. If I can’t have it without despoiling myself of everything that is worth possessing, I prefer to go without.”
“You don’t know what you say!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
“But why? Love would be ruined and desecrated. I understand by it a sympathy so perfect, and a reverence so complete, that the conditions of ordinary domestic existence would be impossible, unthinkable, in connection with it.”
“So do I understand love. But it comes, perhaps, once in a century, and if one is too fastidious, it passes by and leaves one forlorn; at best, it comes only to open the gates of Paradise, for a moment, and to close them again, and leave one in outer darkness.”
“Always?”
“I believe always,” answered Miss Du Prel.
The running of the river sounded peacefully in the pause that followed.
“Well,” cried Hadria at length, raising her head with a long sigh, “one cannot do better than follow one’s own instinct and thought of the moment. Regret may come, do what one may. One cannot escape from one’s own temperament.”