“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car again. “I see. I understand. How did you dare to open those doors to me!”
“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t brought you soon. They were prepared to open their arms to you. They have their laws——”
“But they are your laws. Dicky—how did you dare? Is it because you don’t know me, don’t see me at all? Do you see something which you want to see, that has nothing to do with me?”
“What is it that troubles you so?”
“Myself—always and forever myself! Oh, don’t you see I have nothing to do with them? Why, you’re comfortable, Dicky—your people are comfortable! This is life to you—this, here and now! It isn’t to me. Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldness and pain. In all New York there are not two such opposites. My God is far away. Yours is here—a Person.”
He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would strike you, but I couldn’t cover up on account of that. I belong to them. I’m of them. Any front I might put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge——”
Another time she might have seen the fine thing back of those words, but she took such finenesses of Richard Cobden for granted, while he rarely could understand that she saw anything but his faults.
“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. “I stand to you as the most staid and changeless person, but to my family I am dangerous, a fulminant. They love and trust me, but watch me with fierce concern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions in twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their years.”
His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights of the street, as he drove.
“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sunday afternoon,” she said in an awed voice, “and it feels colder and lonelier than ever before. I even see something of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn to a girl to stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that I’m volatile compared; that my honesty is a fierce effort, a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours is an established habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love it terribly, but it is still on the outside of me—something to attain.”