"That this—this—talk we have had shall make no difference as to your coming to us!"
"What!" she cries, suddenly springing to her feet, tears of remorse and mortification rushing to her eyes. "After having done you the worst injury a woman can do a man, am I to be indebted to you for daily bread—for food, and clothes, and firing? How much lower do you wish me to fall? Have you no pity on me?"
"You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyes fixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging from its strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to me for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back to Bermuda."
"Gone!" she repeats, blankly. "Are you going too? Is everybody going away from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that it will be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your mother and sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!' to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sell matches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"
He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says, looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face, "you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matches either; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!"
"That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I am pretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" she cries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why—why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born—to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come?—who would?"
"I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a bad place, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though it does do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," he adds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long, and there's a better at the other end of it."
"Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy the world without one, can one?" she continues, following out her own ideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there was, and not long hence there will be, no I; but one cannot realize it!"
"Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy.
"The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly, without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, all with some reference to oneself: one cannot understand their all going on when oneself has stopped!"