“You? You’ve been ‘the glory and the dream.’ I shall be needing memories for a while. And when the glory has gone, at least the dream will remain—tethered.”
“But I’m not going to be a dream alone,” she said, with wistful lightness. “It’s far too much like being a ghost. I’m going to be a friend, if you’ll let me. And I’m going to write to you, if you will tell me where. You won’t find it so very easy to make a mere memory of me. And when you come home—When are you coming home?”
He shook his head.
“Then you must find out, and let me know. And you must come and visit us at our summer place, where there’s a mountain-side that we can sit on, and you can pretend that our lake is the Caribbean and hate it to your heart’s content—”
“I don’t believe I can ever quite hate the Caribbean again.”
“From this view you mustn’t, anyway. I shouldn’t like that. As for our lake, nobody could really help loving it. So you must be sure and come, won’t you?”
“Dreams!” he murmured.
“Isn’t there room in the scientific life for dreams?”
“Yes. But not for their fulfillment.”
“But there will be beetles and dragon-flies on our mountain,” she went on, conscious of talking against time, of striving to put off the moment of departure. “You’ll find plenty of work there. Do you know, Mr. Beetle Man, you haven’t told me a thing, really, about your work, or a thing, really, about yourself. Is that the way to treat a friend?”