“With Morgan,—the young zany.”
“Why, you always seemed so fond of him! your one human frailty,” she bantered. But he rounded on her with unwarrantable sharpness. “I think your ladyship is mistaken: I never remember saying I was fond of Morgan. They’re neither of them any more alive than a turtle-dove sunning itself in a wicker cage.”
“You strange creature—have you no natural affections?” she said, with indolent curiosity. “None for that young man, who really devotes himself to you? none for your little harmless sister-in-law?”
“I’m nothing to them—only a blind man to whom they’re kind out of their charity.”
“I don’t believe, Silas, that you are so bleak as you make out.”
“My own solitude, my lady, is my own choosing.”
“Why shouldn’t you accept what comfort those two young things could give you?”
“It’s weak,” he burst out, “why not stand alone? why depend on another? Why shouldn’t the strength of one suffice? Why all this need to double it? Love’s wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more desperately you love. A prop.... Love’s the first tie for an independent man to rid himself of. It’s a weakness that grows too easily out of all proportion. I want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite. So well charted. So ... so recurrent.”
“Another theory, Silas? Be careful,” she lazily teased him; “what we most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear.”
“I shall break them,” he growled.