"Right in believing that women must have larger lives--that they mustn't be expected to feed always upon their hearts. You tell them to let love fill their lives, and then when the lives are swept bare and clean of everything else, in place of love you leave mere vacancy--just mere vacancy and nothing but that. How can they fill their lives with love when love isn't there--when it's off in the stock market or the railroad, or wherever its practical affairs may be?" "But it comes back in the evening." "Yes, it comes back in the evening and falls asleep over its cigar." "Well, you've got me now," I responded cheerfully, "there's no doubt of that, you've got me now." "That's why I'm getting well. How delicious the pines are! and look at the red-bud flowering there over the fence! It may be wicked of me, but, do you know--I've never been really able to regret that you lost your money." "It is rather wicked, dear, to rejoice in my misery." "I didn't say I 'rejoiced'--only that I couldn't regret. How can I regret it when the money came so between us?" "But it didn't, Sally, if you could only understand! I loved you just as much all that time as I do now." "But how was I to be sure, when you didn't want to be with me?" "I did want to be with you--only there was always something else that had to be done." "And the something else came always before me. But my life, you see, was swept bare and clean of everything except you." "I had to work, Sally, I had to follow my ambition." "You work now, but it is different. I don't mind this because it isn't working with madness. Just as you felt that you wanted your ambition, Ben, I felt that I wanted love. I was made so, I can't help it. Like Aunt Matoaca, my life has been swept and garnished for that one guest, and if it were ever to fail me, I'd--I'd go wild like Aunt Matoaca, I suppose." A red bird flew out of the pines across the road, and lifting her eyes, she followed its flight with a look in which there was a curious blending of sadness with passion. The truth of her words came home to me, with a quiver of apprehension, while I looked at her face, and by some curious freak of memory there flashed before me the image of George Bolingbroke as he had bent over to lay the blossom of sweet alyssum beside her plate. In all those months George, not I, had been there, I remembered, and some fierce resentment, which was half jealousy, half remorse, made me answer her almost with violence as my arm went about her. "But you had the big things always, and it is the big things that count in the end." "Yes, the big things count in the end. I used to tell myself that when you forgot all the anniversaries. You remember them now."