Anne wanted to hug Marie-Louise, and with heightened color she listened to Winifred's defense.
"I think we should all like to feel that we are equal to it—to give up money and fame—for the thing that—called."
"There is no better or bigger work for him there than here," Austin proclaimed.
"No," Winifred agreed, and her eyes were bright, "but it is because he is giving up something which the rest of us value that I like him. Renunciation isn't fashionable, but it is stimulating."
"The usual process is to 'grab and git,'" her husband sustained her. "We always like to see some one who isn't bitten by the modern bacillus."
After dinner Anne left them and made her way down in the darkness to the river. The evening boat was coming up, starred with lights, its big search-light sweeping the shores. When it passed, the darkness seemed deeper. The night was cool, and Anne, wrapped in a white cloak, was like a ghost among the shadows. Far up on the terrace she could see the big house, and hear the laughter. She felt much alone. Those people were not her people. Her people were of Nancy's kind, well-born and well bred, but not smart in the modern sense. They were quiet folk, liking their homes, their friends, their neighbors. They were not so rich that they were separated by their money from those about them. They had time to read and to think. They were perhaps no better than the people in the big house on top of the terrace, but they lived at a more leisurely pace, and it seemed to her at this moment that they got more out of life.
She wanted more than anything in the world to be to-night with that little group at Crossroads, to meet Cousin Sulie's sparkling glance, to sit at Nancy's knee, to hear Richard's big laugh, as he came in and found the women waiting for the news of the outside world that he would bring.
She knew that she could have the little school if she asked for it. But a sense of dignity restrained her. She could not go back now. It would seem to the world that she had followed Richard. Well, her heart followed him, but the world did not know that.
She heard voices. Geoffrey and Marie-Louise were at the river's edge.
"It is as if there were just the two of us in the whole wide world," Marie-Louise was saying. "That's what I like about the darkness. It seems to shut everybody out."