He sat in the big chair with his chin in his hand, looking now steadily past and beyond her, one foot restlessly tapping the rug.
“I can’t answer without it seeming so hopelessly egotistical.” The half-whimsical, half-serious smile returned to his eyes. “Don’t let me impose upon your leniency, please; I may wish to make a request sometime again.”
“I will accept the responsibility,” she insisted.
“On your head, then, the consequences.” He 412 spoke lightly, but with a note of restlessness and rebellion.
“To me you are attractive, Miss Willis, because you are everything that I am not. With you there is no necessity higher than the present; no responsibility beyond the chance thought of the moment. You choose your surroundings, your thoughts. Your life is what you make it: it is life.”
“You certainly would not charge me with being more independent than you?” protested the girl.
“Independent!” he flashed upon her, and she knew she had stirred something lying close to his soul. His voice grew soft, and he repeated the word, musingly, more to himself than to her: “Independent!”
“Yes,” with abrupt feeling, “with the sort of independence that chooses its own manner of absolute dependence; with the independence that gives you only so much of my time, so that the remainder may go to another; with the independence of imperative impartiality; the sort of independence that is never through working 413 and planning for others––that’s the independence I know.”
“But there are breathing-spells,” interrupted Miss Willis, smilingly. “To-night, for example, you are not working for somebody else.”
“You compel me to incriminate myself,” he rejoined, the whimsical, half-serious smile again lighting his gray eyes. “I should be working now, and I will have to make up the lost time when I go home.” He bowed gallantly. “The pleasure is double with me, you observe; I do not think twice about paying a double price for it.”