"I don't wish to urge you," she replied, "but yes, I should like to go back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this chance of returning makes it certain."
"And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a military institute?"
"They say expressly that they don't expect you to give instruction in that branch."
"No, not immediately, it seems," he said, with his pensive irony. "And the history?"
"Haven't you almost got notes enough?"
Elmore laughed sadly. "I have been here two years. It would take me twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time nor the money to give to a work I never was fit for,—of whose magnitude even I was unable to conceive."
"Don't say that!" cried his wife, with the old sympathy. "You will write it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in this—watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!"
"Thank you, my dear; but the work won't be lost even if I give it up at this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn't wish to give up my project I couldn't. It's a sign of my unfitness for it that I'm able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it." He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife's tender protest,—"Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!"
"No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice," he said.
"Oh, yes, you will," she returned. "But you need the rest from this kind of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You need a change of standpoint,—and the American standpoint will be the very thing for you."