The agreements lay on the table before him to be signed, and he had just read them over carefully. They seemed to him like a chain that, once signed, bound him to the city, to Bunker's for an indefinite future. His editorial chair had been specially galling that day, perhaps, or the impulse to paint stronger than usual. He threw down the papers and exclaimed,—
"Let's quit, Milly, before it's too late!"
"What do you mean?"
And he made his plea, for the last time seriously, to take their lives in their hands and like brave people walk out of the city-maze to freedom, to a simple, rational life without pretence.
"I want to cut out all this!" he cried with passion, waving his hand carelessly over the huddle of city roofs, "get into some quiet spot and paint, paint, paint! until I make 'em see that I have something to say. It's the only way to do things!"
With passionate vividness he saw the years of his youth and desire slipping away in the round of trivial "jobs" in the city; he saw the slow decay of resolves under the ever increasing demands to "make good" by earning money. And he shrank from it as from the pit.
"I don't see why you say that," Milly replied. "Most painters live in the city part of the year. There's —— and ——"
She argued the matter with him long into the night, obstinately refusing to see the fatality of the choice they were making.
"We can get rid of the apartment any time, if we don't want it," she said, and quoted Hazel Fredericks.
They came nearer to seeing into each other's souls that night than ever before or ever again. They saw that their inmost interests were antagonistic and must always remain so for all the active, creative years of their lives, and the best they could do, for the sake of their dead ideals, much more for the sake of the living child, was decently to compromise between their respective egotisms and thus "live and let live."