"Quite true, but sometimes something is said, it may be only a word, and one's eyes become, as it were, unsealed. One sees a perfectly familiar object or situation in an entirely new light. Your attitude now," he turned to her rather sharply, "is that I am about to blame you, to take you to task. Far from it. Why should I blame you for what has been beyond your power? Your words to-night have made me realize that it has been quite impossible for you to care for me, and that I have not been able to make you happy. Ah," lifting his hand as she was about to speak, "do not disclaim it. I know. You see, that very fact sends the whole house of cards tumbling. The bitterness with which you have spoken to-night would not have been in your mind, rankling, rankling all this time, if you had been a happy woman. It was bound to burst into flame sooner or later."
"Oh!" she broke out. "You have always won. You do not know what it is like to lose; but I—I missed every mark I aimed at. I came up from the South, so dead sure that I was a very gifted and accomplished person, and that all I had to do was to hold out my apron and all the beautiful and delightful things would tumble into it. But this great city surely taught me a lesson, and she's no very gentle teacher, either. And I used to sit up there in that tiresome little apartment among those candle-shades and cotillion favors and think how—how pretty I was," she flushed under his smile, "and rage, and get sick with disgust when I thought how I would look after about twenty years of that kind of life. I knew exactly how I'd look. I'd be one of those peaked, wistful-eyed old maids, with rusty black clothes turning green and brown, and a general air of apology for living. I could just see myself ironing out the ribbons of my winter bonnet with which to trim my summer hat, and then laundering my handkerchiefs and pasting them on the window-panes to dry. And life, life was like a great, wonderful river, flowing by and leaving me stranded on the shore. And then you came."
Hepworth laughed. "I don't wonder that you took the alternative. I'm conceited enough to think it better than those ugly pictures your young eyes were gazing at."
"Yes, they were ugly," she agreed. "Life just seemed like a dark, dreary, cobwebby passageway, but I always felt as if I might come to a door any minute and step through it into a beautiful garden. You seemed the door." She spoke the last words a little shyly.
He glanced at her again, inscrutable, unfathomable things in that gaze. "Ah, youth, youth and the waste of it!" There were tones in his voice that brought the tears to her eyes, but he did not see them. He was musing on the accident of her life, this flower of the dust, which he had taken from the dingy environment she loathed. He had lavished all the beauty and experience within his power upon her, and taken away perhaps the one thing that had redeemed her life. He had seen only the limitations and the makeshifts and how they had oppressed her dainty and fastidious spirit; but it had never struck him before that in lifting her away from them, above them, he had taken from her the one thing that might have glorified her life, that the sordidness and the scrimpiness were for her for ever haunted by the unexpected. That because she was young and beautiful and free, the dreariness must have been irradiated always by the rainbow tints of romance; and he had given her all the beauty and glitter his money could buy in exchange for the joy of a dream, and fancied that he had actually done something for her.
"Dita, forgive me," he murmured, a curiously bitter smile about his mouth.
"Forgive you!" she looked at him a little cautiously. She didn't understand the workings of his mind. He never gave her a hint either in eyes or expression that would seem as a clue for her to follow.
"Yes. You should." Again he smiled at her. "You didn't get a fair exchange. I see that very plainly now."
"You must not speak like that," she said quickly. "Believe me, it was a great deal more than a fair exchange and I have always regarded it so. Why do you think I have not been happy?"
"Because you have never really loved me."