He turned at last, baffled, to the book beside her plate.
"Still keeping on reading, I see. I re—" he stopped short. They both remembered the small book-case with the glass doors that had stood in his mother's parlor in Masonville, and how they had lingered before it on the pretext that she was borrowing a book. "Something good?" he asked hastily. When she showed him the title, he repeated it doubtfully: "Pragmatism? Well, it's all right, I suppose. I don't go much for these Oriental notions about religion, myself."
"It isn't a religion, exactly," she said uncertainly. "It's a new way of looking at things. It's about truth—sort of. I mean, it says there isn't any, really—not absolutely, you know," she floundered on before the puzzled question in his eyes. "It says there isn't absolute truth—truth, you know, like a separate thing. Truth's only a sort of quality, like—well, like beauty, and it belongs to a thing if the thing works out right. I've got it clear in my head, but I don't express it very well, I know."
"I don't see any sense to it, myself," he commented. "Truth is just simply truth, that's all, and it's up to us to tell it all the time."
She knew that an attempt to explain further would fail, and she felt that her mind had a wider range than his; but she had an impression of his standing sure-footed and firm on the rock of his simple convictions, and she saw that his whole life was as secure and stable as hers was insecure and precarious. She felt about that as she did about his house, envying him something which she knew was not as valuable as her own possessions.
A strange pang—a pain she could not understand—struck her when he stopped at the cashier's grating and paid her check with his own in the most matter-of-fact way.
They parted at the door of the lunch-room; for seeing his hesitation she said brightly: "Well, good-by. I'm going the other way." She held out her hand, and when he took it she added quickly, "I'm so glad to have seen you looking so well and happy."
"I'm not so blamed happy," he retorted gruffly, as if her words jarred the exclamation from him. He covered it instantly with a heavy, "So'm I—I'm glad you are. Good-by."
That exclamation remained in her mind, repeating itself at intervals like an echo. She had been more deeply stirred than she had realized. Fragments of old emotions, unrealized hopes, unsatisfied longings, rose in her, to be replaced by others, to sink, and come back again. "I'm not so blamed happy." It might have meant anything or nothing. She wondered what her life would be if she were living in a little house in Ripley with him, and rejected the picture, and considered it again.
Looking back, she saw all the turnings that had taken her from the road to a life like that—the road that she had once unquestioningly supposed that she would take. If she had stayed at home in Masonville, if she had given up the struggle in Sacramento; if she had been able to live in San Francisco with nothing to fill her days but work and loneliness—she saw as a series of merest chances the steps which had brought her at last to Bert.