“I should be only half married to you. I should worry and fuss about my work, as I do now. Four days out of the seven I’m not fit to speak to.”
“You talk as if no one else in the world had ever used a brush. D’you suppose that I don’t know the feeling of worry and bother and can’t-get-at-ness? You’re lucky if you only have it four days out of the seven. What difference would that make?”
“A great deal—if you had it too.”
“Yes, but I could respect it. Another man might not. He might laugh at you. But there’s no use talking about it. If you can think in that way you can’t care for me—yet.”
The tide had nearly covered the mud-banks and twenty little ripples broke on the beach before Maisie chose to speak.
“Dick,” she said slowly, “I believe very much that you are better than I am.”
“This doesn’t seem to bear on the argument—but in what way?”
“I don’t quite know, but in what you said about work and things; and then you’re so patient. Yes, you’re better than I am.”
Dick considered rapidly the murkiness of an average man’s life. There was nothing in the review to fill him with a sense of virtue. He lifted the hem of the cloak to his lips.
“Why,” said Maisie, making as though she had not noticed, “can you see things that I can’t? I don’t believe what you believe; but you’re right, I believe.”