“Should I have told you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I’d have married you, even if you had. It’s not deception, perhaps, when you’ve never seen her nor written to her since you married me; and yet—— Are you going to her, Burt?”
“To-morrow’s the conference. I must be there if I am to be the man chosen.”
“Do you want to go?”
“I wonder,” he mused, “if you’ll understand me when I tell you that, other things being equal, I should go to-night. It’s with no sense of failing you, and with no idea of helping her, but I promised her—that I’d come if she called.”
“Even if there weren’t the conference,” Rhoda said, “you’re a marked man now. You couldn’t go back to a little village in the mountains without it being known and the reason for it blazoned. It wouldn’t do, would it?” She could not quite succeed in making her tone judicial. Her own eagerness palpitated back of the assumed impartiality. “You’ve wanted the presidency too long to throw away the chance of it.”
“I’ve never wanted it,” he said.
“You don’t mean,” she demanded, her vexation rising into view, “that I’ve urged you to seek something you haven’t desired?”
“It’s more complex than that,” he shrugged. “I suppose it’s simply that I married the Armond hope as well as you. Old Peter set a standard for your family which has kept you all up on your toes. If the dead see, he must chuckle sometimes over its way of working.”
“Why?” she flared, letting her annoyance catch at a point of difference less vital than the main issue. “He gave his whole service to his country. He was one of the really great men of his generation, wasn’t he? You’ve never known my father as I knew him. You’ve always let yourself be influenced by the demagogic attacks on him. You’ve thought that because he made a great fortune he couldn’t be an idealist. Haven’t you seen that, if he had been a materialist, he wouldn’t have trained his family as he did? Why, it’s been his torch that I’ve tried to keep alight, and if I have done anything for you, Burton, it has been by that torch’s flame.”