"Because no one understood me," he answered doggedly.
"Was it their failure to understand you, or your failure to give them the opportunity?"
"Both, perhaps. I had no time to fritter away in college; most of the men did."
"There you are! Can't you see what I mean? The particular things the fellows did there were forgotten within twenty-four hours, but the friendships formed while doing them have endured throughout their lives. The 'things' were the means, the experience was the end. What friendships can you have here?"
Instead of answering her, Hamlen rose and motioned silently that she precede him through the arbor and up the path to the edge of the cliff.
"Do you think I can be lonely while I hear the surge of that great ocean upon my shore?" he demanded. "Do you think I miss the friendships which so often bring sorrow in their wake while I can conjure up from the past the most glorious friends the world has ever known, visit with them, argue over my pet theories, and give them all this setting here whose counterpart can never be surpassed?"
She smiled sadly in reply. "You have built your life upon the same basis as this island itself," she said—"upon the foundations of what is dead and past. You have argued with yourself until you have come to believe the fallacy you preach—that you, an Anglo-Saxon, can be content with such a life as this. Are you true to your responsibilities? Are you—"
"What do I owe the world?" he interrupted. "I ask from it nothing but peace and solitude, and surely even the most insignificant has a right to that without incurring responsibilities. Why, Marian, I stand here upon this Point, as the little steamers leave their trail of smoke behind them, and thank God that for one day, three days, a week, we are cut off from the world. There is nothing I love so much as this separation from my fellow-men."
"Then how fortunate, after all—" she began, but he interrupted her.
"That is another story," he insisted. "I am speaking of what life means to me to-day, not what it might have meant under other circumstances."