"You don't know me yet. It isn't that I don't want to. It's because I can't—no glory to me. But, Alves, we are all right. I can get enough in one way or another to keep the temple over our heads, and I can work now. I have something in view; it won't be just chasing about the streets."
This reference to his own work both pleased and saddened her. The biologist, who had befriended him before, had given him some work in his laboratory. The work was not well paid, but the association with the students, which aroused his intellectual appetites, had given him a new spur. What saddened her was that it was all entirely beyond her sphere of influence, of usefulness to him. Living, as they should, in an almost savage isolation, she dreaded his absorption in anything apart from her. There were other reliefs, consolations, and hopes than those she held. He was slipping away into a silent region—man's peculiar world—of thought and dream and speculation, an intangible, ideal, remote, unloving world. Some day she would knock at his heart and find it occupied.
She leaned heavily upon his arm, loath to have his footsteps so firm, his head so erect, his eyes so far away, his voice so silent.
"You are not sorry," she murmured, ashamed of iterating this foolish question, that demanded one answer—an answer never wholly satisfying.
"For what?" he asked, interrupting his thought and glancing out into the black waters.
"For me—for all this fight for life alone away from the people who are succeeding, for grinding along unrecognized—"
He stopped and kissed her gently, striving to quiet her excited mood.
"For if you did, I would put myself there, in the water beside the piers," she cried.
He smiled at her passionate threat, as at the words of an emotional child. Underneath his gentleness, his kindness, his loving ways, she felt this trace of scepticism. He did not bother his head with what was beginning to wring her soul. In a few minutes she spoke again:
"Miss M'Gann thinks Dr. Leonard knows why I was dismissed. Mrs. Ducharme, she said, had been hanging about the Everglade School district. I remember having seen her several times."