"There is nothing I would not do for you or for her!" he said.
"I know that, Peter. What wonder that I had my dreams about you?"
"They were dreams, just dreams," he responded, and now he was speaking more easily. "I wasn't the right man for Sheila after all. If I had been, she would have realized it; she wouldn't have married some one else."
"How could she realize it—at twenty? And she was barely twenty when she married. Peter, there's a moment in a girl's life when, consciously or not, her whole being, soul and body, cries out for love. And if a man is at hand then—any presentable man—to answer, 'I am love,' she believes him. That moment came to Sheila—and Ted was there!"
"Oh," cried Peter, "Oh, surely there was more to it than that! Surely there was real love!" And when she did not answer, he repeated earnestly, "Surely there was real love!"
"You plead for Ted?" asked Mrs. Caldwell with a touch of irony.
"I plead for her. Ted doesn't matter, and I don't matter. But Sheila—Oh, I can't bear that she should have only a second-rate thing, an imitation. I can't bear that."
"She thinks it's real love she feels for Ted. And as long as she thinks so, Peter, she'll be happy. What we have to do for her—what you have to do for her when I'm gone—is to keep her thinking that. It isn't her baffled gift I worry about; it's the discontent her gift may rouse in her; the awful vision it may bring her. I see so clearly how she was married—and she must never see! If ever you find her beginning to see, you must blindfold her somehow. I've often thought that women should be born blind—or that their eyes should be bandaged at birth."
"Horrible!" exclaimed Peter.
"No—kind! All the creatures of our love would be beautiful then; all the circumstances of our little destinies noble and splendid. We'd create them so in our own minds, and disillusionment could never touch us."