Cosimo spoke spiritlessly.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while my thinking when you’re here. I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t think,” Amory answered slowly, “that in cases like this one person has really the right to settle things for another. As you know, I hate the word Conscience; I prefer the expression Personal Will; but that’s what it seems to me to be.”
“But in so many things my will’s yours, Amory. You see deeper than I. You’re constructive. You’re one of the world’s Makers of Things. I should be a very good lieutenant or something, but I’m quite without the creative gift. Won’t you help me to do all those beautiful things, Amory?”
But evidently Amory didn’t understand him. She replied, with quick eagerness—
“Gladly—oh, so gladly! You know you have only to ask, Cosimo, now or at any time.”
Cosimo tried again.
“I—I don’t mean that exactly,” he stammered. “That’s splendid, that part in the Crown of Wild Olive, I know, but—but—I mean something else, Amory—dear——”
His hand had slipped from the back of the bench; softly it lay on Amory’s shoulder. He could hardly believe that it had lain there many times before, it lay so differently softly now. And yet Amory did not seem to recognize the difference in the softness, nor did she appear conscious that he had called her “dear” in a tone he had never used before. She put her finger-tips lightly on his knee. “Wait a bit,” she said. “I have it on the tip of my tongue—it’s not the Crown of Wild Olive; it’s Sesame and Lilies—you know—that passage about gossiping with housemaids and stableboys when you might be conversing with kings and queens—I shall remember it in a moment——”