"So now, as he stood there with her, looking down in her face, touching her friendly hand, I think that was the first real, overhauling minute when he was just swept by the understanding that his loss was so many times what he'd thought it was going to be. For it was her that he wanted, it was her that he would miss for herself and not for any dear plans of work-fellowship alone. She understood his dream, but there was other things she understood about, too. A man can love a woman for a whole collection of little dear things—and he can lose her and grieve; he can love her for her big way of looking at things, and he can lose her and grieve; he can love her because she is his work-fellow, and he can lose her and grieve. But if, on top of one of these, he loves her because she is she, the woman that knows about life and is capable of sharing all of life with him and of being tender about it, why then if he loses her, his grieving is going to be something that there ain't rightly no name for. And I think it was that minute there in the road that it first come to Insley that Robin was Robin, that of all the many women that she was, first and most she was the woman that was capable of sharing with him all sides of living.
"'I wanted ...' she says to him, uncertain. 'Oh, I wish very much that you would accept the invitation to some of the house party. I wanted to tell you.'
"'I can't do that,' he answers, short and almost gruff. 'Really I can't do that.'
"But it seemed there was even a sort of nice childishness about her that you wouldn't have guessed. I always think it's a wonderful moment when a woman knows a man well enough to show some of her childishness to him. But a woman that shows right off, close on the heels of an introduction, how childish she can be, it always sort o' makes me mad—like she'd told her first name without being asked about it.
"'Please,' Robin says, 'I'm asking it because I wish it very much. I want those people up there to know you. I want—'
"He shook his head, looking at her, eyes, mouth, and fresh cheeks, like he wished he was able to look at her face all at once.
"'At least, at least,' she says to him rapid, then, 'you must come to the party at the end. You know I want to keep you for my friend—I want to make you our friend. That night Aunt Eleanor is going to announce my engagement, and I want my friends to be there.'
"That surprised me as much as it did him. Nobody in the village knew about the engagement yet except us two that knew it from that night at Mis' Emmons's. I wondered what on earth Insley was going to say and I remember how I hoped, pretty near fierce, that he wasn't going to smile and bow and wish her happiness and do the thing the world would have wanted of him. It may make things run smoother to do that way, but smoothness isn't the only thing the love of folks for folks knows about. I do like a man that now and then speaks out with the breath in his lungs and not just with the breath of his nostrils. And that's what Insley done—that's what he done, only I'm bound to say that I do think he spoke out before he knew he was going to.
"'That would be precisely why I couldn't come,' he said. 'Thank you, you know—but please don't ask me.'
"As for Robin, at this her eyes widened, and beautiful colour swept her face. And she didn't at once turn away from him, but I see how she stood looking at him with a kind of a sharp intentness, less of wonder than of stopping short.