“How sweet and beautifully sad!” affirmed Miss Gardner. “Death is always so sweet and sad, isn’t it, Mr. Forge? But then, not so sad as disappointed love. Have you ever been in love, Mr. Forge?”
“Yes,” responded Nathan thickly.
“Oh, how romantic! And did you suffer a great disappointment?”
“Oh, I lived through it,” returned the boy with a sad laugh.
“But what you really mean to say is that it left its scars on your soul. True love always does that, doesn’t it, Mr. Forge?”
Nathan began to feel that the temperature of the room was uncomfortably high.
“I guess I don’t know much about true love,” he returned. “To be frank, I’ve never run up against the real thing.”
“I understand perfectly. You’re waiting for some great overwhelming passion to come into your life and sweep you off your feet. There’s always an overwhelming passion in everybody’s life, isn’t there, Mr. Forge? How true! How true!”
Nathan had an uncomfortable hunch that the Gardner girl was talking drivel. So he put a new piece of music on the rack before her.
“Let’s play this,” he suggested in lieu of a lowered window.