“Will not your father object?” said Maggie, withdrawing her hand. “I should not give you up on any ground but your own wish, Maggie,” said Philip, colouring. “There are points on which I should always resist my father, as I used to tell you. _That_ is one.” “Then there is nothing to hinder our being friends, Philip,—seeing each other and talking to each other while I am here; I shall soon go away again. I mean to go very soon, to a new situation.” “Is that inevitable, Maggie?” “Yes; I must not stay here long. It would unfit me for the life I must begin again at last. I can’t live in dependence,—I can’t live with my brother, though he is very good to me. He would like to provide for me; but that would be intolerable to me.” Philip was silent a few moments, and then said, in that high, feeble voice which with him indicated the resolute suppression of emotion,— “Is there no other alternative, Maggie? Is that life, away from those who love you, the only one you will allow yourself to look forward to?” “Yes, Philip,” she said, looking at him pleadingly, as if she entreated him to believe that she was compelled to this course. “At least, as things are; I don’t know what may be in years to come. But I begin to think there can never come much happiness to me from loving; I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do.” “Now you are returning to your old thought in a new form, Maggie,—the thought I used to combat,” said Philip, with a slight tinge of bitterness. “You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one’s nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.” The bitterness had taken on some impetuosity as Philip went on speaking; the words were evidently an outlet for some immediate feeling of his own, as well as an answer to Maggie. There was a pain pressing on him at that moment. He shrank with proud delicacy from the faintest allusion to the words of love, of plighted love that had passed between them. It would have seemed to him like reminding Maggie of a promise; it would have had for him something of the baseness of compulsion. He could not dwell on the fact that he himself had not changed; for that too would have had the air of an appeal. His love for Maggie was stamped, even more than the rest of his experience, with the exaggerated sense that he was an exception,—that she, that every one, saw him in the light of an exception. But Maggie was conscience-stricken.