Selden smiled, but not ironically. “Well, isn’t that a tribute? I think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them.”
She had turned to gaze on him gravely. “But isn’t it possible that, if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things–its purchasing quality isn’t limited to diamonds and motor-cars.”
“Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a hospital.”
“But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my ambitions are good enough for me.”
Selden met this appeal with a laugh. “Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!”
“Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I probably shan’t like them?” She drew a deep breath. “What a miserable future you foresee for me!”
“Well–have you never foreseen it for yourself?” The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.
“Often and often,” she said. “But it looks so much darker when you show it to me!”
He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air.
But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. “Why do you do this to me?” she cried. “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?”
The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon’s solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.
“No, I have nothing to give you instead,” he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. “If I had, it should be yours, you know.”
She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he saw that for a moment she wept.
It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she turned on him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he said to himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art.
The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony: “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?”
Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with a gesture of coquetry, but as though renouncing something to which she had no claim.
“But you belittle ME, don’t you,” she returned gently, “in being so sure they are the only things I care for?”
Selden felt an inner start; but it was only the last quiver of his egoism. Almost at once he answered quite simply: “But you do care for them, don’t you? And no wishing of mine can alter that.”
He had so completely ceased to consider how far this might carry him, that he had a distinct sense of disappointment when she turned on him a face sparkling with derision.
“Ah,” she cried, “for all your fine phrases you’re really as great a coward as I am, for you wouldn’t have made one of them if you hadn’t been so sure of my answer.”
The shock of this retort had the effect of crystallizing Selden’s wavering intentions.
“I am not so sure of your answer,” he said quietly. “And I do you the justice to believe that you are not either.”
It was her turn to look at him with surprise; and after a moment–”Do you want to marry me?” she asked.