“You must not be unhappy.”
She turned, with a look of surprise, a look that asked him how he knew her heart.
“I know it from your face, your demeanor all the time, whatever you're doing,” he said.
“If you mean that I seem grave,” she replied, with a faint smile, “it's only my way. I've always been a serious person.”
“But your gravity wasn't formerly tinged with sorrow; it had no touch of brooding anxiety.”
“How do you know?” she asked, wonderingly.
“I can see that your unhappiness is recent in its cause. Besides, I have heard the cause mentioned.” There was an odd expression for a moment on his face, an odd wavering in his voice.
“Then you can't wonder that I'm unhappy, if you know the cause.”
“But I can tell you that you oughtn't to be unhappy. No one ought to be, when the cause belongs to the past,—unless there's reason for self-reproach, and there's no such reason with you. We oughtn't to carry the past along with us; we oughtn't to be ridden by it, oppressed by it. We should put it where it belongs,—behind us. We should sweep the old sorrows out of our hearts, to make room there for any happiness the present may offer. Believe me, I'm right. We allow the past too great a claim upon us. The present has the true, legitimate claim. You needn't be unhappy. You can forget. Try to forget. You rob yourself,—you rob others.”
She gazed at him silently; then answered, in a colder tone: “But you don't understand. With me it isn't a matter of grieving over the past. It's a matter of—of absence.”