Aimée Desclée seemed to rise before him, and cry to him:
'Why tempt another on my path?'
He said to her solemnly and tenderly, while his voice sounded very grave in the silence of the emptied theatre:
'My dear, we cannot call back the Athens of Pindar for you, nor yet give you the ideal world of your fancy. If you want to be great in our world as it is, you must breathe its air, which is dust and chokes sensitive lungs. When the air is gold dust it is not much lighter to breathe, though people fancy it light as the air of the planet Venus. If you decide that it will be too weighty for yours, I do not say that you will not decide wisely. Your friend Othmar has told you that obscurity and liberty are the happier choice. He is a man who knows by experience how painful a thraldom are eminence and wealth. You yourself may attain eminence, and wealth too, possibly, probably, but you cannot do so and remain free to be all day long under the blue sky. You must dwell in the air that is full of dust, and poisoned by being shared by a million mouths. That air killed Aimée Desclée.'
Damaris was silent.
She went out beside him through the sordid ways and shabby passages of this temple of the acolytes of fame, and thence into the crowded streets, which were grey with a leaden-coloured slow rain.
Oh, how sweet the rain was in the country, scudding over the green fields, brimming in the grass holes, hanging from the orchard boughs, shining in the window lattices, lying in the great dock leaves! How the snails came out in the glistening roads, and the birds drank it from off the ground, and the ducks went about in the little shallows it left, and how merry and glad the whole land was!
'You love the country,' said Rosselin, when they had walked the length of some streets in silence. 'You love the country, my dear. Stay in it; you have enough to live on; let fame go by, unsought, unmourned.'
Damaris sighed: