“You aren’t fair to Simeon—to me,” she retorted hotly.
“You make nothing of that hunger for something beautiful, that love—I had it, you can believe me. Some people have it and die unless—”
“Did you get what you wanted?” Jennings exclaimed, pacing back and forth across the strip of gravel.
“No!” she exclaimed in something like a sob. “The joy faded so fast! And the more I grow to know, the less I am filled with the old rapture. I have striven so to possess joy, and gone so low in my own sight. It is bitter, bitter—”
“Europe tempts us Americans,” her companion interrupted excusingly. “It holds so many treasures, and the life of the spirit is organized here. I came near giving in, once, those days in Oxford where everything seemed spread for enjoyment. I rather longed to help myself to dainties until I was full. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s against nature, a sin against nature. Life is not fulfilled, we are not quieted, in that way. To accept the world as it comes to our hands, to shape it painfully without regard for self,—that brings the soul to peace.”
He had made his decision, and evidently he had found some solace. She could not take the same road easily; she had gone the other way. She looked up into his face longingly, pleadingly, as if she were wildly hoping that he would take her with him, that he would not leave her in her wanderings.
“I am going back to the niggers,” Jennings continued after a pause in a lighter tone. “Won’t that please Mrs. Stevans! I think my friends expected me to become another kind of Erard.” He laughed good-humouredly. “And likely enough they are right, to thrash about for the sweets and what you call freedom. But it seems to me ridiculous and undignified.”
With these careless words he seemed to close the topic which had agitated her so profoundly. She felt that she ought to have enough pride and self-reliance to accept her difficulties silently, but a certain feminine dependence on leadership—strange to herself—left her feeble before this crisis. She appealed to him audaciously, clinging to his strength. “And I—what shall I do?”