Warren did not think it particularly mattered, and said so. Prudence, who did, proceeded to explain to herself, rather than to him, where their roads had, in the past, taken them. She liked to be quite sure, to arrive at sureness by thinking things thoroughly out.
'We've all been wrong, and all through different lacks in us—different failures of understanding. I've hated ugliness so much that I haven't tried—I haven't even wanted—to see the beauty that's always tangled into it. I've just looked the other way. That was through being a prig, and stupid. You've minded ugliness so little (though you've seen it all right) that you've accepted it, traded on it. That was through being lacking in some sense—I think, perhaps, the sense of beauty, and a little in the moral sense, too.' Prudence was being offensively frank, as she was apt to be when she thought things out aloud. 'And the Crevequers haven't known, really, what ugliness was. That was through never having learnt, chiefly. And,' she summed up after a moment, 'there we all stand.'
'So it seems,' Warren said. 'It must be a satisfaction to have it all so clearly arranged.'
Prudence went on, undisturbed.
'And what I should like to know is where we shall eventually stand. You say it doesn't matter; of course, as a matter of fact, it is the one thing which does. Where we go, and what we see by the way—oh, what else is there?'
'Where we mayn't go,' Warren answered her drearily, 'and what we miss by the way. It matters more, for it's better—more worth going to, better worth seeing.'
To that she said nothing. They both thought of it all, silently: of how four ways had come together for a little at the cross roads, how those who travelled along them had met and spoken and taken again the parted ways, where they ran beyond range of sight into a grey land, towards horizons blind with mist—blind and dark to one of the two who stood now and looked; but to the other limitless, luminous, soft with the shrouded brightness of the dawn.
'Oh,' said Prudence presently, her thought running on what we miss by the way, 'we—our sort of people—being so respectable and so honest and so refined, sit on our pedestals and look down and talk and analyse, because we've got a few things that they haven't; but, really, I am looking up all the time. For, whatever they haven't got and haven't done, they've at all events lived. They keep on doing that all the time; they always will, in whatever particular way they do it. It's such an immense thing, that. Living is like an art, that some people never learn at all; I suppose the Crevequers were born knowing it—they had no need to learn it. And if they haven't learnt quite all about it yet, well, that's only a question of time. They've got the genius of it all right. That's what I look up to in them. And,' she added, since the Crevequers were being so thoroughly thought out, 'they have another thing—the best thing they've got, the thing that will in the end matter, however much everything else fails—they have each other.'
At that Warren's face took a greater bitterness.
'So I was given to understand,' he said. 'I was told that they, being so much the same sort, wanted no other companionship. The combination of either with anyone else, it seemed, would not work—would be a disastrous fiasco, in fact.'