She smiled.
“So you are at your old work still. Why, why, why? What is the reason? It is enough for me,” she said, “if I find out what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is real and what is not. Why it is there, and over the final cause of things in general, I don’t trouble myself; there must be one, but what is it to me? If I howl to all eternity I shall never get hold of it; and if I did I might be no better off. But you Germans are born with an aptitude for borrowing; you can’t help yourselves. You must sniff after reasons, just as that dog must after a mole. He knows perfectly well he will never catch it, but he’s under the imperative necessity of digging for it.”
“But he might find it.”
“Might!—but he never has and never will. Life is too short to run after mights; we must have certainties.”
She tucked the box under her arm and was about to walk on, when Gregory Rose, with shining spurs, an ostrich feather in his hat, and a silver-headed whip, careered past. He bowed gallantly as he went by. They waited till the dust of the horse’s hoofs had laid itself.
“There,” said Lyndall, “goes a true woman—one born for the sphere that some women have to fill without being born for it. How happy he would be sewing frills into his little girl’s frocks, and how pretty he would look sitting in a parlour, with a rough man making love to him! Don’t you think so?”
“I shall not stay here when he is master,” Waldo answered, not able to connect any kind of beauty with Gregory Rose.
“I should imagine not. The rule of a woman is tyranny; but the rule of a man-woman grinds fine. Where are you going?”
“Anywhere.”
“What to do?”