He sighed as he looked at her. He smiled very faintly as he answered, "Yes, I am afraid you are right. I am not as I was." His gaze swept out over the stalls, the crowded foyer, the brilliance everywhere. "But how could I have done anything else than let all this affect me a little? I am pliable, I suppose, and I bend easily to the wind. I came here to taste life. As soon as I began to sip the cup I found that I was going to like it immensely. I trod the way of the world that I might see what manner of men walk there, and what sort of a road it was. Presently, I found that I liked that path so much that I preferred it to the bypaths of solitude and asceticism. And what has it mattered as long as I have not neglected the work there is for me to do? No one can say I have changed in that respect. I work harder than ever. It's not fair of you to upbraid me. A great deal of it is your own doing."
"Yes?"
"Of course it is. You have been my pilot out of the land of the Narrows. When I came up here I was narrow. I thought about things dogmatically, and applied hard and fast rules to every sort of conduct. Now I am broader. I know that where the world moves at lightning speed you cannot apply the same tenets that hold good in a village where life is lived at a cripple's gait and where routine is the reigning deity."
"You would not have called it a 'cripple's gait' a little while ago," interposed Mrs. Stewart.
He flushed slightly but went on: "I realize now that since we have but one life to live, we should live it as fully as we may. I could not have seen the life that all of you here are living without realizing that it was a fuller life than the one the country afforded me. So, cost what it may, I must needs live it also."
She looked at him curiously. "Yes," she repeated, half to him and half to herself, "cost what it may."
"Besides," he went on, looking away from her, and with something of regret in his voice, "I have grown worldly because I loved a worldly woman. You—you have made me love you."
She lifted her eyebrows a trifle, turned her head, with the eyelids drawn down over her eyes, toward him, and opened the lids slowly, with a smile on her lips. Then she looked past him to where her husband was leaning over a chair in one of the other boxes.
"Don't you think John is looking very handsome tonight?" she asked softly.
Lancaster, who had gone red and pale in waves, answered, through set lips, "Very."