“Am I? So are you. It is Mr. Drake here and Mr. Drake there! Are you trying to force me into his arms?”
“Is it you that says that, Glory—you? and to me, too? Don't you see that this is a different case altogether? And if I thought of my own feelings only—consulted my own heart——”
“Rosa!”
“Ah! Is it so very foolish? Yes, he is young and handsome, and rich and brilliant, while I—I am ridiculous.”
“No, no, Rosa; I don't mean that.”
“I do, though; and when you came in between us—young and beautiful and clever—everything that I was not, and could never hope to be—and he was so drawn to you—what was I to do? Nurse my hopeless and ridiculous love—or think of him—his happiness?”
“Rosa, my poor dear Rosa, forgive me! forgive me!”
An hour later, dinner being over, they had returned to the drawing-room. Rosa was writing at the table, and there was no sound in the room except the scratching of her pen, the falling of the slips of “copy,” and the dull reverberation of the bell of St. Clement's Danes, which was ringing for evening service. Glory was sitting at the desk by the window, with her head on her hands, looking down into the garden. Out of the dead load at her heart she kept saying to herself: “Could I do that? Could I give up the one I loved for his own good, putting myself back, and thinking of him only?” And then a subtle hypocrisy stole over her and she thought, “Yes I could, I could!” and in a fever of nervous excitement she began to write a letter:
“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and so with a woman's will. I can not go abroad with you, dear, because I can not allow myself to break up your life, for it would be that—it would, it would, you know it would! There are ten thousand men good enough for the foreign mission field, but there is only one man in the world for your work in London. This is one of the things hidden from the wise, and revealed to children and fools. It would be wrong of me to take you away from your great scene. I daren't do it. It would be too great a responsibility. My conscience must have been dead and buried when I suggested such a possibility! Thank God, it has had a resurrection, and it is not yet too late.”
But when the letter was sealed and stamped, and sent out to the post, she thought: “I must be mad, and there is no method in my madness either. What do I want—to join his life in London?” And then remembering what she had written, it seemed as if the other woman must have written it—the visionary woman, the woman she was making herself into day by day.