"I know," she admitted, striving to ease the pain her words had inflicted; "but your father—and your classmates."
"Yes—my father. I was wrong to leave him. Had I waited but two years longer, I should have left behind me no ties of any kind. But the good old pater understood me; he was the only one who ever did."
"Haven't you kept in touch with any one at home?"
"This is 'home,'" he corrected.
"Not for you, Philip," she insisted. "This is a Garden of Eden, as you yourself called it, this is a dream life of sunshine and the fragrance of flowers, this is the home of the lotus-eaters, for the present moment enticing men—and women, too—away from the stern pursuits of life; but it is not 'home' for such as you."
"I have found it all you say and more," Hamlen replied firmly; "but it has not been the life of inactivity which you suggest. The very things which tempted you to turn in here from your drive show that my years of patient study and experiment have not been altogether in vain. Inside the house I have my library, which can scarcely be equaled in the States. There I keep up my work more assiduously than I could possibly have done elsewhere. The literature of the past belongs to me, for I have made it part of myself. I know Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, not as books only, but almost word for word. I can speak five languages as well as my own. Is this the existence of the lotus-eater, Marian? Is this merely the dream life of sunshine and of flowers?"
She looked at him long before replying. Then she rested her hand gently upon his arm.
"It's the same Philip, isn't it?—the same old Philip who refused, over twenty years ago, to recognize the real significance of life? The same Philip—older, more refined by the chastening of time, more polished by the refinement of accomplishment, but with his eyes still closed to the difference between the means and the end."
The expression on Hamlen's face showed that he failed utterly to comprehend.
"Why had you no friends to leave behind you?" she asked abruptly, realizing the cruelty of her question, but determined to make him see her point.