“I know. It’s very nice of you to say it, but you don’t understand. Think of me stuck down in a small Indian station——” Wylie opened his lips, but closed them again. “You told me long ago you were to be stationed in a horrid, humdrum little place when you went back. Nothing would happen, there would be the same dull, deadly monotony of duties every day—and yet I couldn’t have a writing fit in peace. It isn’t even as if you were still on the frontier.”
“It’s rather a good thing I’m not, if your feelings would be liable to change the moment I was transferred anywhere else. But I should have thought a quiet, regular life would have been the best possible thing for your writing.”
“For manufacturing books, not for writing. Why, just think, if I woke up one day with a perfectly splendid idea, and wanted simply to sit down and work it out—not to bother about meals or anything, except coffee and biscuits, or something of that kind, which I could eat without thinking about it. You would come—I know you would—and sweep my books away ruthlessly, and insist upon my taking proper food, and expect me to be grateful to you for doing it!”
“And I should be disappointed? Well, I will try to moderate my expectations. It might come to our both having scratch meals, surrounded by books, at opposite corners of the table.”
“No, you would never get like that, and it’s quite right you shouldn’t. You would have your duties, demanding punctuality and regularity, and all the things I want to escape from for a time, and you would insist on them. It would be different if you were more easy-going.”
“I’m afraid the woman who marries me will have to take me as I am—unless she can change me. Zoe, take me in hand, won’t you? I’ll give you a free hand to make all the alterations and improvements you like.”
“But it’s just those very qualities that I like in you. No, you won’t see. When—I mean if—I marry, I shall really do my duty and settle down. If I went back with you now, I should sink my own life in yours. I should think of nothing but seeing that your meals were in time and as you liked them, and that the house and everything did you credit, and you would congratulate yourself on having driven all my foolish aspirations out of my head. And then one day I should wake up to find that I was growing old, and had done nothing, and the visions had faded, and I should—hate you. No, I shall never be young again, I shan’t always feel my heart leap up with a great idea coming suddenly—I must follow the gleam while I can. It will be different in a few years, but at present I have such lots of interests, and I can’t narrow them all down to——”
“To one man and his career? Well, put it that you spend these years as you suggest. What then?”
“Why, whether I succeed or fail, I shall have tried my wings, ‘proved my soul,’ like Paracelsus. Perhaps the visions will fade naturally, perhaps they will be more under control. Then I shall have time for the other side of life.”
“In other words, you might be willing then to turn to the man who loved you and had spent his best years waiting for you?”