And then, seeing his quandary in his eyes, she went on.
“Can you imagine yourself, Quincy dear, as just a lost note in this ugly din?—here it is all about us. Of course you can’t! But I can. Because I know so many such—because most of me is just that sort—and dedicated to it. Well, if you shrink ever to be just part of the din, you’ll be lost to me; you’ll be worse, even worse than I am. You’ll be utterly and dismally negligible. I shan’t be able to notice you at all.” She paused. “Quincy—I’m straining with you with all my might, so that shan’t be.”
Why would she not accept him, whatever he might be, or turn to? Why was she always a taskmaster before she would be friend? Why did she demand that he work for her smile?
At last, he spoke this out.
“You don’t care for me a bit, just for myself.”
“That’s sentimental! Of course, it is what you can give me, what differentiates you, that I can care for. Otherwise, why am I dining just with you?”
He shook his head. He had come there swinging in his momentum. And Clarice was standing still. She had a philosophy against moving with him. It occurred to him that this rational friendship was the antipode of love. And this troubled him—unreasonably, since he felt no love for her.
There was a dear light in Clarice’s eyes—while all his mind grew blurred.
“You don’t despise—just being,” she rebuked him. “Just being has eaten into you a bit. Whenever I look at you, I feel the danger that you are going to melt away; and that in your place where I was so glad to know you, I shall some day find a ghost, an echo, an empty shell—like the rest.”
“And what do you give me, to help keep me real? A set of rules!”