"Dear child, how tired she'll be. Never mind, she'll have a good rest during the next ten days."
"Will she stay ten days? She'll be here as long as you will then, won't she?"
"Yes; I'm going when she does."
"You think that the house will be done by that time?"
"I know that it will be done. It must be done."
He took his cigarette up in his fingers, turned it about a little, and then looked suddenly straight at her. "Alva, tell me the mystery, tell me the story, please. What is the house for?"
She looked at him and was silent.
"Why won't you tell me?"
Still silence. Still she looked at him.
"You'll tell her when she comes. Why not me?"
She spoke then: "She'll be able to understand, perhaps. You couldn't."
Ingram compressed his lips. "And am I so awfully dense?" he asked, half hurt.
"Not so dense, but, as yet, too ignorant. Or else it is that I am still too little myself to be able to rise above some human sentiments. And there is one point where endurance of the world's opinion is such refinement of torture, that only the very strongest and greatest can go willingly forward to meet and suffer the inevitable. The inevitable is close to me these days; it is approaching closer hourly, and there is no possible way for me to make you or the world understand how I feel in regard to it all. And I shrink from facing the kind of thing that I shall soon have to face any sooner than is absolutely necessary. And so I won't tell you."
She stopped. Although her voice was firm, her eyes had again become far away in their expression, and she seemed almost to have forgotten him even while making this explanation for his sake. He was watching her with deepest interest, and the curiosity in his eyes burned more brightly than ever.
"But if it is all as terrible as you make out," he said, "how can you make that young girl understand what you suppose to be so far beyond me?"
"Because I can teach her."
"How?"
"She'll be with me night and day for ten days. We'll have a good deal of time together. And then, too, she is a woman. Women learn some lessons easily. Easier far than men."
"Is it right to teach her such a lesson as this?"
"Why do you ask that, when you do not know what my lesson will be? How can you dare fancy that it could possibly be wrong?"
Ingram paused for a minute, a little staggered. Then he said, bluntly: "The world is made up of reasonable men and women, and it seems to me best that all men and women should be reasonable. What isn't reasonable is wrong. Forgive me, Alva, but you don't sound reasonable."
"You think that I am not reasonable? Therefore I must be wrong. That's your logic?"
He hesitated. "Perhaps I think you wrong. I must confess that to me you often seem so."
She thought a minute, considering his standpoint.
"Ronald," she said then, "'reasonable' is a term that is given its meaning by those in power, isn't that so? 'Reasonable' is what best serves the ends of those who generally seek to serve no ends except their own. It's true that I don't at all care what a few selfish and near-sighted individuals think of me. I have thrown in my lot with the unreasonable majority, the poor, the suffering, and those yet to be born who are being robbed of their birthright. To leave my mystery and go back to our familiar difference, there's the dam to illustrate my exact meaning. The 'reasonable' use of the river out there is to build a dam, and so make a few more millionaires and give employment for a few years to a few thousands of Italians. The 'unreasonable' use to make of the river is to preserve it intact for tired, weary souls to flee to through all the future, so that their bodies may breathe God and life into their being again, and go forth strong. You know you don't agree with me as to that view of that case, so how can I expect you to disagree with the general opinion that the 'reasonable' thing for me to do personally is to take my life and get all the pleasure that I can from it? The 'unreasonable' view, the one I hold myself, is that I have elected to take it and give – not get – all the pleasure that I can with it. Of course you don't understand that unreasonableness, and so you don't agree with me; but I can tell you one thing, Ronald," she leaned forward and suddenly threw intense meaning into her words, "and that is this. My story – my mystery as you call it so often – is at once a very old mystery and a very new one. I have suffered, and I am to suffer, most terribly. The happiness to which I am looking forward is going to be an ordeal for which all that I have undergone until now will be none too much preparation. But in the hour of my keenest agony I shall be happier and more hopeful than you will ever be able to realize in your life. Unless you change completely. Take my word for that."
She rose as she spoke, and he rose, too, looking towards her with eyes that plainly subscribed to Mrs. Ray's opinion as expressed in the simple vernacular.
"Oh, no, I can't understand, and I don't believe," he said: "but I am able to meet trains, anyhow."
A large cape lay on an empty chair near by, and she took it up now.
"But I'm going alone," she said, as she slipped into it.
"What nonsense. Of course I am not going to let you go alone."
She looked at him, buttoning the woolen cross-straps upon the cape as she did so; then she threw one corner back over her forearm and laid that hand on his, speaking decidedly.
"I'm going alone to meet her. You know what I asked you to promise when I came here a week ago, and you know that you gave me your word that you'd never interfere with me. Lassie is almost a stranger to you, and after you have learned to know her as a young lady there will come years for you two to talk together, but for me this meeting is something that I don't want to share. Don't say any more."
"But what will she think," he queried, "when she and you return together, and here sits a cavalier who didn't trouble himself to accompany one lady through the dark night to meet another's train?"
"She will think nothing, because she will not see the cavalier. When we come in, we shall go straight up-stairs."
Ingram more than smiled now. "Forgive me, Alva, but you and I are such old, such near, such dear friends, that I can say to you frankly, as I do say to you frankly over and over again, I don't understand you."
She laughed at that, and turned towards the door.
"I know – I know. I'm very queer, most awfully queer, in the eyes of every one. But I can tell you, as I tell them, that the worst of it is only for a little while. Just a few brief weeks and I shall be again, in most ways, a normal woman. A woman just like all the rest again," her back was towards him now, "in most thing – in most things."
"Never! You never have been like other women, – you've always been different from other women; you always will be."
"Have I? Shall I? Well, perhaps it's so. I'm rather glad of it. Most women are stupid, I think. Poor things!" she sighed.
He followed her as she moved towards the door, half-vexed, half-laughing:
"And men, Alva, and men. Are they all stupid in your eyes?"
She had her hand on the knob, and her great cape was gathered about her in heavy folds.
"Oh, Ronald," she said, looking into his look, "if you had any idea how fearfully stupid they seem to me. Often and often in the last three years. Even yourself. And ten years ago, when we were eighteen and twenty-five, I thought you so interesting, too."
He burst out laughing at that, – it wasn't in him to take her seriously enough to really mind her "ways" long.
"But what are we to do, when we are such mere ordinary creatures? And you know, my dear, that if the transcendentals like to muse on bridges by moonlight, some well-educated, commonplace individuals must build them the bridges first."
"Ah, there you go again. Yes, that's true. One should never forget that, of course. Particularly when talking with