'You've made your amends,' she said. 'First by the things you've said to her; and now you will be making them again by leaving her alone, as she wishes. There's no other you can make. Don't you see?'
'I see I've got to,' he said harshly. 'I've been made to see that clearly enough lately. Oh, I suppose I've got to accept it—sit down under it.'
Prudence mused over it.
'It's been rather strange all along,' she said, more to herself than to him. 'For we did our part to them, for good or evil, and they theirs to us, by accident, and now that it's done we can't be of any more use to each other, in the straits we're all, I suppose, in, through all we've come to see and know. They want nothing of us, and we had better want nothing of them; our uses for each other are over; there it is, you see. They must leave us to help ourselves, and we must leave them to help themselves and each other. And I hope we shall all do that; only it will have to be along our own lines, not along other people's. You can't step out of your own road into somebody else's; there are chasms between, too wide to jump. And if you do manage to jump them, you don't know the geography of the new road, and you only lose your way. I can't help being stiff and puritanical and disliking certain things. They can't help being—well, street-children of gregarious habits and wide tastes. Why should they? It's merely being themselves. But though I may be a prig, I can yet try to understand and not to keep aloof; and though they may be—well, they can improve their roads too. It's always open to us to improve our own roads—only not, I think, successfully to leave them.'
Thus Prudence, working it out for her own satisfaction, her considering brows puckered over the light that her thought had kindled in her far-seeing, discerning artist's eyes. This side of it—the moral side, the ultimate side, call it what you will—was of salient clearness to her; it predominated, rising vividly out of the tangle of issues. It was to her the thing that greatly mattered, that it was always open to us to improve our own roads.
To Warren (the discrimination was partly, perhaps, one of sex, a good deal between the idealist and one who was not, whatever he was, at all an idealist) what may be called the moral aspect was obscured. He had wanted something and had failed to get it; that for him summed up the matter. Later, he might come to realize many things, all the things that Prudence realized, that the Crevequers realized—how the fusion of two 'sorts' was at the best a rash experiment, at the worst a most tragical catastrophe; how the matter had been, no doubt, wisely decided. Now he knew but one thing: what he so greatly desired he might not have. Prudence's vision of it seemed of little relevance to him. They might all follow their improved roads anywhere they chose; they might climb heights, in that grey future wherein he at least must be (so it seemed to him at this time) a solitary pedestrian; how they might help themselves and each other concerned him not at all.
His clever face was very bitterly set as he stared at the ground, brooding over it. It was probable that he too had learned something, the insolence, as his cousin had termed it, of his past attitude having so recoiled upon himself.
'Oh,' said Prudence, suddenly, following up her own talk of roads, 'I wish we could leave them—I wish we could; but walls shut us in. The walls of character, and circumstances, and old habit; we can't break through them. We only knock against them—and it hurts.' She stopped, because her voice shook strangely. After a moment she said quietly: 'We can't do that. We can only try to keep the gaps wide, and look through them.... But there are one or two things we can do besides that. Mr. Crevequer will want to get something to do afterwards; I told you, didn't I, that they are giving everything up.'
'Oh! That charming paper. About time, too, I should say. Well?'
'Well, I thought you might write to that Settimana Illustrata man you know at Genoa. They are going to their old home for the present; but eventually they would like work at Genoa. I should think the Settimana might give him something to start on; he's quite clever, of course; and he really can draw, can't he? Genoa's near their home. They'll have all their old friends to play with, and of course they'll make new ones, and of course their friends will be of all sorts; their road takes them there. What I don't know,' she added presently, 'is where else it is going to take them, and where ours are going to take us.'