"Jenny dear, don't talk like that. Why should you? You don't surely doubt my love!"
"Of course not, Theophil. It was only my silly little brain thinking for once in a while,--and I don't mean to be unkind, but really I rather mean it. Are you still quite sure there is nothing in the world more important than love?"
"Quite sure," he answered; "surer than ever--if that were possible. You are not beginning to doubt that? Certainly it is a silly little brain, if that's what its thinking is coming to."
"I don't mean it for myself. Little women have nothing but love to think of; but great men, men with a mission in the world ..."
"Please, Jenny!"
"Well, dear, I mean it; and I sometimes think that perhaps, perhaps, I'm hindering your life; that if you were to be bothered with love at all, you should have married some clever, wonderful woman,--woman, say, like Isabel."
"Jenny!"
"Of course, dear, I know you don't think so," she continued; and he realised that it was all artless accident on her part--"Still I cannot help thinking it for you sometimes, dear, and sometimes I feel very selfish to have your love,--as though, so to say, I was wearing someone else's crown."
"Jenny dear, will you promise never to talk like that again? A clever woman! To be a woman is to be a genius, but to be a clever woman is to be another man of talent."
"That wouldn't be fair to Isabel."