“It will take a great deal of both to make me sensible,” she answered humbly, and then added, “if suffering would root out my fancies—but I am like the child that tumbles and tumbles, and then tumbles again. I need to be guided by such a steady hand. Sometimes I do long so for somebody to do me good.”
Her companion’s silence might be sympathetic; as such she interpreted it, or she could not have said what she never ceased wondering at herself for saying—“I am not disappointed in love; but I am disappointed in loving. I thought that love was once and forever. Poets say so.”
“Yes, but we do not know how they live their poetry.”
“I know that my poetry fails me when extremity comes.”
“Has the extremity come?”
“Yes,” she said bravely.
“And that is another thing that I am not to know.”
“Not for five and fifty years. I will pigeon-hole all my experiences for you—if there is no one to object on my side or yours.”
“What about the reading? Was it all that you expected?”
“Wait a minute; call Dine before we talk it over.”