"I will give you time," he said, so simply that she smiled.
"If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it, somehow, before you cared for me. I'm not certain that I ever could. And if I couldn't? You see, don't you?"
"I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have," he so far asserted himself. "But I thought I ought to be honest."
"Oh, you've been honest!" she said.
"You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person," he resumed, "and I don't blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your voice. I can't tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It wasn't merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that."
"I don't know whether fancies are such very bad things. I've had some of my own," Barbara suggested.
He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.
"There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?"
She took time to consider this. "I might have been vexed, or hurt, I suppose, but I don't see how I could really have been offended."
"Then I understand," he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano. The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.