Ruth laughed a little nervously. She had always wondered exactly what had taken place that day in the studio, and the subject was one which she was shy of exhuming. She turned the conversation.
“What did you ask me just now? Something about——”
“I asked you what you had in common with these people.”
Ruth reflected.
“Oh, well, it’s rather difficult to say if you put it like that. They’re just people, you know. They are amusing sometimes. I used to know most of them. I suppose that is the chief thing which brings us together. They happen to be there, and if you’re travelling on a road you naturally talk to your fellow travellers. But why? Don’t you like them? Which of them didn’t you like?”
It was Kirk’s turn to reflect.
“Well, that’s hard to answer, too. I don’t think I actively liked or disliked any of them. They seemed to me just not worth while. My point is, rather, why are we wasting a perfectly good evening mixing with them? What’s the use? That’s my case in a nut-shell.”
“If you put it like that, what’s the use of anything? One must do something. We can’t be hermits.”
A curious feeling of being infinitely far from Ruth came over Kirk. She dismissed his dream as a whimsical impossibility not worthy of serious consideration. Why could they not be hermits? They had been hermits before, and it had been the happiest period of both their lives. Why, just because an old man had died and left them money, must they rule out the best thing in life as impossible and plunge into a nightmare which was not life at all?
He had tried to deceive himself, but he could do so no longer. Ruth had changed. The curse with which his sensitive imagination had invested John Bannister’s legacy was, after all no imaginary curse. Like a golden wedge, it had forced Ruth and himself apart.