"But you," he urged one day, "you who are a daughter of the fields and woods, why should you forsake that pure life, and come to waste yourself here?"
"Why, don't you think it's very nice in Florence?" she asked, with eyes of innocent interest.
"Nice! Nice! Do we live for what is nice? Is it enough that you have what you Americans call a nice time?"
Clementina reflected. "I wasn't doing much of anything at home, and I thought I might as well come with Mrs. Lander, if she wanted me so much." She thought in a certain way, that he was meddling with what was not his affair, but she believed that he was sincere in his zeal for the ideal life he wished her to lead, and there were some things she had heard about him that made her pity and respect him; his self-exile and his renunciation of home and country for his principles, whatever they were; she did not understand exactly. She would not have liked never being able to go back to Middlemount, or to be cut off from all her friends as this poor young Nihilist was, and she said, now, "I didn't expect that it was going to be anything but a visit, and I always supposed we should go back in the spring; but now Mrs. Lander is beginning to think she won't be well enough till fall."
"And why need you stay with her?"
"Because she's not very well," answered Clementina, and she smiled, a little triumphantly as well as tolerantly.
"She could hire nurses and doctors, all she wants with her money."
"I don't believe it would be the same thing, exactly, and what should I do if I went back?"
"Do? Teach! Uplift the lives about you."
"But you say it is better for people to live simply, and not read and think so much."