‘Not my Towers,’ she said, with a little half-reproachful look at him and a sudden clasping together of her lightly interlaced fingers.
‘Well, let us say Tom’s Towers; but in present circumstances it is very much the same.’
Once more a little shiver ran over her, though there was no chill at all in the soft air that came in from the lake and the moonlight. But her voice was a little uncertain with it, as if her teeth had chattered. ‘Don’t talk of it,’ she said; ‘I want no Towers. I want not a place at all, or any quarters, but a house, a pretty house, just big enough for us and them, somewhere, wherever you would like, Edward.’
‘I shall like what you like,’ he said.
‘But that is not what I wish at all; I want you to tell me what will please you. You would like to be within reach of the great libraries, within reach of what is going on. No one can write what is to live without being within reach——’
He shook his head. ‘You are too partial in your estimate of what I am likely to do; so long as I am within reach of you—and thank God nothing can put me out of that!—I don’t know that I care for anything more.’
‘That is what I should say, Edward,’ she said, with some vehemence, ‘not you. Do you think I am such a silly woman as to wish you to be entirely occupied with me? No, no; that is the woman’s part.’
‘Well,’ he said, with his usual soft laugh, ‘mine is the feminine rôle, you know, to a great extent. Fortunately, my disposition quite chimes in with it.’
‘What do you mean by the feminine rôle?’
‘My love, I don’t mean anything. I mean that life was too many for me when you and I were parted. I was the divided half, don’t you know, “of such a friendship as had mastered time.” Being sundered from my mate, time mastered me: I took to floating, as you don’t like to do, even on the lake.’