# The Sense of the Past (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Sense of the Past/Book 1

BOOK FIRST
They occurred very much at the same hour and together, the two main things that—exclusive of the death of his mother, recent and deeply felt by him—had yet befallen Ralph Pendrel, who, at thirty, had known fewer turns of fortune than many men of his age. But as these matters were quite distinct I take them for clearness in their order. He had up to this time perforce encountered life mainly in the form of loss and of sacrifice—inevitabilities these, however, such as scarce represented a chequered career. He had been left without his father in childhood; he had then seen two sisters die; he had in his twentieth year parted by the same law with his elder and only brother; and he had finally known the rupture of the strongest tie of all, an affection for which, as a living claim, he had had to give up much else. Among these latter things, none the less, he had not as yet had to reckon Mrs. Stent Coyne, and this even though the thought of such a peril was on the eve of his crisis fairly ​present to him. The peril hung before him in fact, though the first note of the crisis had by that time already sounded, from a different quarter, in the guise of a positive stroke of luck. It appeared that what destiny might call on him for this time would not be just another relinquishment. A letter from a friend in England, a fellow-countryman spending a few months in London and having friends of his own there—had mentioned to him the rumoured grave illness and imminent extinction, at a great age, of the last person in that country bearing Ralph's family name, a person of a distant cousinship with whom he had been indifferently aware. His indifference was not a little enlivened by a remark of his correspondent. "Surely when he does die you'll come in for something!"
"Surely" was a good deal to say and the whole hint fantastic—it took so much for granted; yet the words had an effect. This effect was that Ralph determined to mention the matter on the same occasion as something else the revolving months had charged him with, something he had at last really straightened himself to say to the woman he loved. He had had his fears, and in addition to other hindrances, infelicities of circumstance, imperfections of opportunity, had long deterred him, and he was now disposed to throw himself upon anything that could figure as a help. It might support him to be able to tell her there was a ​chance for him of a property—probably of some wonderful old house—in England: though less, properly speaking, as an improvement to his state of fortune, which might sufficiently pass, than as a bribe to her sense of the romantic. That faculty had originally been strong in her and what could be more depended on at any time in New York, in Park Avenue, to show as inordinate, as fetching, by the vulgar term, than so possibly to "come in" for something strange and storied, ancient and alien? Aurora Coyne was magnificent; that was where his interest in her and her effect upon him were strongest. Beautiful, different, proud, she had a congruity with things that were not as the things surrounding her, and these usual objects, in whatever abundance, were not the bribe to offer. He was glad, at this hour, that his name, by common consent—above all, always, it was true, in Park Avenue—cast a fine sharp traceable shadow, or in other words that his race had something of a backward, as well as of a not too sprawling lateral reach. He knew how little his possession of more mere money would help him, and also that it would have been in his interest to be personally quite of another type; but that his cleverness could on occasion please her he struck himself as in a position to remember, and he at present, turning the whole case over, found aid in the faith that she might at the worst marry him for curiosity. He was for that matter ​himself just now inflamed with a curiosity that might prove communicable.
The element of uncertainty at all events, such as it was, came largely from the late changes in her own condition; so far as it was not likewise distinguishably riper fruit of the impression in him, rather heavy from the first, of something that he could only call to himself her greater knowledge of life. He had already more than once had to take into account that of the two she had seen, as people said, much the most of the world; and she had not at present seen less of it for returning to America, after her husband's death in the south of Europe and on the admonition of still other circumstances that he divined as beyond his measure, with something of the large air of a public policy. Her departures, absences, returns, returns as for the purpose of intensifying fresh disappearances, these things were what had somehow caused her to glare at him, to dazzle and almost to blind him, as by a wider initiation. He had seen her thus only at certain points of her sustained revolution; had been ignorant of many things with which the cup of her own knowledge overflowed; had been in short indebted for the extent of his privilege to the mere drops and lapses in the general time, as he termed it, that she so insolently kept. Sharing continuously as a child, and then as a growing girl, the life led by her parents in other countries, she had had behind ​her, at their first meeting, on their twentieth birthday—for in respect of age they marched well enough together—if not fifty years of Europe at least something that already caused him to view his untravelled state as a cycle of Cathay. The time immediately following had been her longest period at home, as well as that of his happiest opportunity—an opportunity not so enjoyed, however, as to have forestalled her marriage with so different a person and so selected a suitor as Townsend Coyne, which event had in its turn been rich in consequences.
Some of these, like the immediate migration to Europe of the happy couple, as the pair were prefigured, had been of the sort essentially indicated; such others as Coyne's early failure of health during a journey to the East had been unexpected and lamentable. He had reappeared with his wife, after a year or two, in America, where the air of home so reinforced him at first as to make the presumption of their settling for some stay natural; and then, disappointed and threatened afresh, had a second time taken flight with her to spend another term, wearily enough, in consultations and climates. The issue at last, indeed too promptly, had been Coyne's death, foreseen for some months, at Pisa, a place he liked and had been removed to from Florence, choosing it, as he said, in view of the end. Stricken and childless, his young widow had once more ​crossed the sea and, announcing her purpose of an indefinite rest, had spent in New York another winter, in the course of which Ralph Pendrel, held fast there by his close care of his mother, at this time more of a charge than ever and steadily failing, had repeatedly seen her; all of which, none the less, had not prevented, on Mrs. Coyne's part, the perversity of yet another departure, a step sudden and inconsequent, surprising and even disconcerting to our young man, possessed as he definitely was by that time of the length he would have gone had he been able a little longer to avert it. He had felt a delicacy about proposing marriage to a woman supposedly in grief, certainly in the deepest mourning, so that in again spreading her wings she struck him as having profited a little unfairly by his scruple. It was in fact as if she had gone because knowing what would happen if she didn't; but it was also precisely because she had described herself as now nevermore going that he had, in his delay, taken counsel of the decency with which he supposed she would credit him. Some such credit she had in fact doubtless given to him, but what was the use in New York of an advantage that could be enjoyed—really to call enjoyed—but, for example, in Rome? There were moments in which indeed for that matter he scarce quite knew what he had done for himself—measuring it as so distinct a quantity to have introduced confusion into his ​friend's sequences. Perhaps after all she had retreated only to mark the more sharply the act of waiting. Wasn't it at any rate something for him to have caused her to give up a plan? The appearance was composed of two elements and might become clearer could these elements somehow be reconciled. He and her plan were not, after all, quantities that should absolutely refuse to mingle, and on the question of the particular something that might be given up for something else the combinations—between two persons not wholly unintelligent—were practically infinite. There might always be something to be gained so long as anything to be renounced was left. And finally in fact when poor Mrs. Pendrel did pass away it was quite as if Aurora had acted in obedience to some such view. She disembarked yet again from the frequent Cunarder, and this time, as appeared and as I have hinted, with a mind fully made up. She at once took possession of the ample house her husband had left her.
She had never been more splendid, it may at once be said, than in the light of the reception she gave him on the morrow of these events: she fed with so free a hand his fancy—all uninstructed as he ruefully confessed it—of her resemblance to some great portrait of the Renaissance. That was the analogy he had, at favouring times, in the approaches to Park Avenue, or perhaps still more in the retreats from it, fondly and consistently ​found for her: she was an Italian princess of the cinque-cento, and Titian or the grand Veronese might, as the phrase was, have signed her image. She had a wondrous old-time bloom and an air of noble security. The roots of her flowering were watered by Wall Street, where old Mr. Coyne and her maternal grandsire, both still in the field and almost equally proud of her, conspired to direct the golden stream; though the plant itself seemed to spring from a soil in which upheavals—when upheavals occurred—offered to panic at least a deeper ground than a fall in stocks. Large calm beauty, low square dresses, crude and multiplied jewels, the habit of watching strife from a height and yet of looking at danger with a practised bravery, were some of the impressions that consorted with her presence. When therefore she had, with whatever kindness, shaken her slow head at Ralph three times, there came to him a sad sense of his having staked his cast, after all, but on the sensibility of a painted picture. She had touched him at other times with a high hardness, whereas at present, clearly, she would have given anything to seem mild; only it was at the end of ten minutes of such mildness as if he stood under her closed window in darkness and sleet. This brought the truth home to him as it had not yet come: he had nothing in common with her apprehension—so particular, so private as that would be—of the kind of personal force, of action ​on her nerves and her senses, that might win from her a second surrender. Strange he had always thought it that her first had been, against all the likelihoods, Townsend Coyne, so queer though so clever, so damaged, to the extent even of considerably looking it, yet somehow so little touching in proportion, and so suggestive of experience, or at least of overstrained and ambiguous knowledges, by the large expense of it all, as who should say, rather than by equivalents accruing in the way of wisdom or grace. Ralph reflected as to this, at the same time, that in the case of a relation of that intimacy, really of that obscurity, nothing was appreciable from outside; this was the commonest wisdom of life—little indeed as it governed the general pretence of observation that no one but the given man and the given woman could possibly know the truth, or indeed any of the conditions, of the state of their being so closely bound. It didn't matter now therefore that the conditions of the Coynes had put him a question impossible to answer; the answer was Aurora's own, for whatever future application, whatever determination of her further conduct: she had been admirable and inscrutable—that was the only clearness; though indeed with it one might at a stretch inwardly remark that if the future did owe her amends she probably saw them as numerous.
Could she have shown him, at any rate, in a ​burst of confidence, this compensating vision, he would have liked exceedingly to see it, even at whatever cost to his own pride; but she nursed it now, at least to begin with, in silence, only signing faintly, to his embarrassment, with her grand thick-braided head. What this most suggested to him was that if at twenty-two she had married a condemned consumptive she wouldn't now, at thirty, marry a mere thinker—which was what Ralph amusedly knew himself to pass for in New York, where the character indeed is held almost as much in honour as that of the dervish in the East and where once, at his door, it had been all but set down to him as professional by the man calling about the Census or the Directory. Aurora Coyne's backers, her ancestor and her late husband's, as Park Avenue so often termed grandparents and parents, were members of the local Chamber of Commerce, but he himself should more fitly have been a Malatesta or a Sforza: then she might have been contracted to a despot or a condottiere. Within the quarter of an hour he had completely lowered his crest. "I see, I see," he said, "I'm even less possible to you than I feared; and heaven knows I hadn't sinned by presumption." She continued to say little in reply—so little that, to ease positively for herself the awkwardness of so few attenuations, he risked expressing her view, risked even, for charity, making her contradict him. He imputed to her ​not quite a wish to dismiss him wounded, yet making her care enough to contradict him would a little diminish his defeat. "The one kind of man you could really fancy would be some big adventurer. You'll marry the day you meet one of your own proportions and general grand style, a filibuster or a buccaneer. You might do with a great soldier—all the more that there are some such about; yet even that is not the exact note. You won't of course confess to it, but he should have a shade of the ruffian. It's a pity there are no more pirates—you'd have doted on Paul Jones. The adventurer isn't enough—your ideal's the desperado. I too, however, in my way, am desperate. But I'm too intellectual."
"You know," she presently replied, "how clever I've always thought you."
"Well then you see how clever I am. I've put my finger straight on the place. You can't deny it. I see you as you are, and you don't see me; so that after all I've in a manner the advantage."
She spoke always but after little intervals; yet not as if to show she had taken one's words in, for his at least were never directly met. "I haven't waited till now to feel that you'd never be happy with me. I'm quite too stupid."
"That's but a way of saying that I'm quite too small. What need have I, all the same, of anyone else's wit?"
​"I like men of action," she at last returned. "Men who've been through something."
"And I've been through nothing—I see—but the long discipline of my choked passion for you."
She kept answering—her bold grave eyes fixed on him, counting with nothing, evading nothing—as if she had not heard him. "If it could be a man of your kind at all it would be you. There are things in you I like so. But that you should give up anything for me—that I should find quite horrible. You must become great. Intellectually," she explained as if she quoted it out of a book.
"Yes," Ralph laughed even while he sighed—"dry up to it, shrivel down to it! You must despise me to say such a thing as that to me! Why not tell me at once that you hope you may never see me again?"
"You're beautiful," she remarked without pity.
"A beautiful worm?" he asked; "a delicate classified insect? a slow-crawling library beetle, slightly iridescent, warranted compressible—that is resisting the squash—when the book is closed to on him?"
"You're beautiful," she simply repeated.
He appeared at this to take something of it in, or at any rate to make something of it out. "Why won't it just do then that one is a gentleman—and for all that not a fool?"
"Oh it does do—for being glad I know you and that you're just as you are. It's good to know ​there are people like you—though I assure you I don't dream there are many. You're beautiful," she observed once more.
"Thank you very much!" he observed with frank irritation. "I had rather you found me ugly enough to think of. If I could make out what it is you want one to have done I promise you it wouldn't leave me gaping. What is it, what is it?" he pressed. "There's something you've a fancy for that we're not in the way of—any of us: devilish poor lot as we are! I've at least this superiority, you see, that I want to know it. Name it—come, name it; and no matter how dreadful or how criminal it may be I won't flinch from it."
Still with her eyes on him, and even, as it might have seemed, with the oddest perversity of admiration, she waited after her wont. But when she spoke it was terrible. "Just pursue your studies."
It positively affected him for an instant as a blow across the face, putting a quick flush there and a tear in each eye. "How you must really hate me!" And then as she herself changed colour: "And all because I've written a book!"
Though she changed colour indeed she granted nothing: "Which I've read," she only replied, "with the greatest interest—even if I don't pretend to have understood it all. I hope you'll write many more."
​"'Many more'!"—he laughed out. "Charming," he scoffed without seeing where he went, "charming the way you appear to imagine one throws such things off! The idea people have of 'books'———!" He had gone too far before he saw it—had gone so far that the next instant, at the sight of something in her face, there was nothing but to pull up. She really cared, and he had been calling her 'people,' had been grotesquely tilting before her at a shapeless object stuck up by himself, and stuck up crooked. She really cared, yes; yet what was it withal she cared for? He took a different tone in a moment to ask her, and in another she had begun in her own way to tell him.
"I've had in my mind—in connection with my ever marrying again—a condition; but it's a matter I meant to speak of only when driven to the wall, as I'm bound to say I think you've driven me." With which she went on as if it explained everything. "I've come home, you know, to stay."
For Ralph it explained too little; yet as there was something in her look that amplified it he saw more or less what was coming and he smiled without pleasure. "You said that—don't you remember?—the last time."
"Yes, I said it the last time, and you've every right to laugh at it and to doubt it. No one but myself can know that I'm serious, or why, and I can't give my reasons and I dare say I must accept ​being ridiculous. At any rate," she added with a kind of beautiful grimness, "I shan't parade my ridicule about the world. I shall have it out here." The force of her emphasis affected him indeed as strange, but she pursued before he had time to take it up. "I shall never—oh but never—go back."
It struck of a sudden a fuller light, and he seemed to understand. There was something she wouldn't, she couldn't name, but her accent alone sufficiently betrayed it. She had had "somewhere abroad," as poor Ralph used so often to put it, an encounter, an adventure, an agitation, that, filling her with rage or shame, leaving behind it a wound or a horror, had ended by prescribing to her, as a balm or vengeance, the abjuration of the general world that had made it possible. What such an accident could have been—to such a woman—was ground for wonder; but Ralph felt easily enough that it was yet none of his affair and that he should even perhaps at no price ever learn it. It had poisoned for her a continent, a hemisphere, and such a hush for the moment fell upon him that he might verily have been in presence of it. While they kept in communication during these instants he at any rate put things together. "The condition you speak of is then that one shall never ask you again to leave this country?"
She shook her head as for pity of his poor vision, though he pretended so to vision. "No. It's worse than that."
​Then it was really that he guessed, though there was something in him that couldn't make him eagerly jump to it. "Of course," he vaguely observed, "your having had your fill———!"
"Yes," she sighed with all the meaning his drop didn't grasp, "I've had my fill!"—and she turned away as if he might already now see too much. The next minute, however, she was upon him again with what had to serve for the time as the rest of the story. "It's too monstrous a thing to ask, and I don't ask it. It makes everything so impossible that I should have liked a thousand times better your not speaking to me. It can do, you see, neither of us any good; for it only offers me as rather crazy—as heartlessly perverse if you like—and yet gives you no hope of curing or redeeming me. I should have to ask, you know," she now fully explained, "for a vow."
He smiled from further off. "That I shall take my oath———?"
"Never yourself to go."
"Not anywhere, you mean?"
Her pause had this time more visible thought. "Nowhere you most want. Oh," she declared, "I know what you most want and what you've a thousand reasons for wanting. I know just what your admirable life has been and how, by so rare a chance, you've been held fast here and prevented. I know you're at last free, and that—except, if you insist on it, your idea about me ​—you've naturally now no other thought in your head but to make up for lost time and repair your sacrifice. That's naturally your necessity much more than the fancied necessity in obedience to which you've spoken to me; and my conviction of this is what makes me bold to speak to you as I do. I don't fear, you see"—she gathered confidence, she gathered even a force of expression she had never known, as she went—"that I shall have it on my conscience that I've succeeded with you. I shall on the contrary simply have exposed myself; which I shan't at all regret, however, if I've helped you to clear up your feelings." To this service of charity in fact, and nothing more, she had finally the air of lending herself, while Pendrel began to take it all from her as if he too saw the truth. It was at the same time characteristic of her that at the moment of indicating the sacrifice she made, the exposure, as she called it, that she consented to, for his ultimate peace, she drove well home the knife she had planted. "My excuse would have been—if there were any chance for me—that you happened to be so perfect a case for what I call to myself salvation. One doesn't easily find a man of your general condition who has not, as we say, 'been'; and much less therefore a man of your particular one. By your particular one," Aurora Coyne wonderfully proceeded, "I mean that of knowing so much that might seem to have ​been to be got at only by immense experience. You know everything, and yet you've learnt it all over here; some miracle or other has worked for you or—it comes to the same thing!—for my vision of you: I don't know, even with your happy conditions, after all, what it can have been, but it makes you, doesn't it? the single case of your kind. If you had been spoiled there would have been no use—and of course as it is there's none. Only I can't help having just put it to you thus," she wound up, "that you've not been spoiled."
There was no doubt of the nature of the effort made by Pendrel to do these remarks justice. "You do put it to me with the magnificence that attends every breath of your being. I haven't been spoiled—I see quite what you mean—I only can be."
"You only will be," she said almost tenderly. "You'll be beautifully spoiled."
"For you, that is, of course," Ralph went on.
"For me—certainly. Isn't it only of myself after all that we're talking?"
He answered nothing and the silence between them was for a little as if she had suddenly given him a chance. This effect moreover grew from what he finally said; which was after he had restlessly moved to the window, looked out thence for some instants and then come back. "You would definitely accept me if I did formally give up everything but this?"—and he jerked his ​head at the outer world of which he had with such intensity just renewed his impression.
"Ah," she disappointingly answered, "I don't absolutely say that."
Poor Pendrel again stared. "Then what do you say at all? Do you expect me to renounce for nothing?"
"I don't expect you, as I've perfectly told you, in any degree to renounce. Why should you?" she added. "No one will ever have an idea of what you have lost."
"No one but myself," he said with his eyes on her.
"Oh I think you will least of all."
She had answered so straight that it had almost the sound of levity; by the hint of which he was justly enough irritated. "It's too portentous—what you ask!"
But she found for this her quickest reply. "I don't ask anything. It's you who ask. I only answer. I decline the honour of your hand, and I give my reasons. If I had given none I should have been doubtless less absurd, and my reward is that I'm not really sure I should have been even less cruel. I'm sure," she continued, "but of one thing—or rather perhaps of two: that I'm as insane as you please, but that I'm also as rigid. Don't think, at all events, that you need, or that you possibly can, tell me how my attitude strikes you. Do me the simple justice to believe that I know."
​So she appeared quietly to conclude, and it was in her quietness indeed that her perversity most showed; though this was in a manner an aid, if a lame one, to her suitor, called upon at a moment's notice both to measure its extent and to give up the hope of getting round it. "You call me a 'case,' but it seems to me you're at least as extraordinary a one."
"I didn't apply the term to you abusively," she made sufficient haste to explain. And then as, however she applied it, he but sat, in his hard dilemma, with his head in his hands: "Am I not the first to admit that I can only appear unaccountably exalted—it's the word you must have in your mind about me; and exalted on the subject on which it most seems to people grotesque to be so?" She gave herself up, in fine, as extravagant, maniacal, and then, further, to the moral of it, which was that they lacked all ground for possibly meeting. They must accept their preposterous difference, and she could herself do so the better that she was sure of what he had intended to say to her. He had his plans made; he "sailed," didn't he? next week, next month, next year even, if that should be more convenient to her, and had come to propose that she should sail with him. This was, as he saw, not so much as discussable; but he must go on sailing as if nothing whatever had happened. He must stay a long time, and it was indeed all but a certainty ​for her that when once he should get well into it he would find himself staying indefinitely. Yes, that was inevitably what must happen to him: he offered the bright example of a man of thirty, with means, curiosity, the highest culture, who had, for whatever reasons, never gone at all, but he would show how people with that history infallibly made it up by never coming back when once they did go. Why should he come back? With his tastes, his resources and opportunities, his intensified longing and disciplined youth, he would have an admirable life.
Many things were before him while she talked, but most of all perhaps the almost sinister strangeness of his having been condemned to this ordeal. It was the last predicament he had ever dreamed of, the prescription of further patience least on the cards for him, he would have supposed, and least congruous with other realities. This in fact made her spring of action, the unconfessed influence that had worked in her, constantly less and less doubtful. The difficulty was that though he had everything on his side he actually felt himself in a cleft stick. "Don't you then," he appealed, "just simply and personally care for me the least little bit? What you seem to me to have in your head," he went on after waiting a while in vain for her reply, "is, however you express it, a mere cold little theory, which is rather proud of itself, but which has the peculiarity of being both ​sophisticated and stupid. I don't quite see, you know, why I should be offered up on such an altar." After which, as she was still silent, though only as if because she had already said all: "Is it inconceivable," he demanded, "that I should in the course of time go for a few months without you?"
She smiled in her implacable splendour at his touching want of grasp. "Isn't the whole point that you can't possibly go for a few months? It would be a shame moreover if you did. I had quite as soon you went for a lifetime as for three days. I want you perfect, and three hours would prevent it. When I say 'I want' you," she handsomely developed, "I only mean I should want you if I had a right. My insanity, I quite understand, deprives me of all rights. But at the same time," she insisted, "you don't in the least undermine it by calling it a cold little theory. I don't pretend that it's anything else: my cold little theory is exactly indeed that it would be interesting to catch you—catch you young, as they say, since you are young—and put you through."
He followed her with his face of gloom. "For the amusement of seeing what I should be at fifty?"
"There you are"—it had made her again quick; "and see what it is to be really intelligent! Precisely for the amusement, if you prefer that word—though I should use some other: save ​for the high idea, the intense interest, the peculiar beauty. I should see," said Mrs. Coyne, "what it makes of a man."
"You would indeed!" her visitor brooded.
She laughed out at his tone. "Ah but don't put it as a threat—as if you'd be Nick o' the Woods, and, to punish me for what I should have kept you from, wish to beat out my brains. You'd really be as pleased with me, I feel sure, as I should with you, and we'd grow old together in honour and patriotism." She became, however, the next moment braver; which had the effect of showing her as kinder. "It's all, when one considers, the fault of your peculiar situation—added, I mean, to the turn of your mind. The result of the combination of your starved state (which I call, you see, to oblige you, what you would call it) and your natural passion for everything old is as calculable as to-morrow's dawn." It was the sort of fact one could put in a nutshell. "The only way for you not to remain is not to go."
"You'll see whether I remain," Ralph said as drily as he could.
"Oh but do! Do," she earnestly repeated. "The great thing is after all not to spoil it—whichever way you take it; and isn't it also, when one thinks, much better you should be perfect for yourself than for me?"
"How you must, fortunately, hate and loathe me!"—Ralph returned to that with the same ​mastered misery. "Because if it weren't for that what a question for us to separate on!"
This appeared just to strike her. "It wouldn't be such a base one as you seem to suggest; but, to give you the benefit of the doubt, don't let us admit for a moment that it is the one! By which I mean that we don't separate, inasmuch as for people to do that they must first have come together. For you to decline my condition I must first have imposed it. I mentioned just now," she added for further lucidity, "the fact that makes you such a catch for one's theory, but I didn't mention the other fact, the way you're in spite of everything pledged and committed—which spoils it all. The ideal subject of my experiment," she perfectly allowed, "needn't certainly be that particular rare bird, a young New Yorker who's an ardent student of history. It's over there," she appeared magnanimously to muse, "that history can best be studied!"
"How you laugh at me and lash me and rub it in!" Ralph grimly observed.
But she put the matter for him now as if in her achieved indulgence of it no misjudgment could interrupt her. "You've earned your holiday, and nothing can be more right and just than for it to be long and unclouded. I know nothing of a finer grace than the way you've gone on year after year doing without it for the charity nearest home; and I'm not so stupid as not to have a ​notion of the disadvantage at which, in the intellectual work you scraped time for, your limitations and privations must often have placed you. You did it, bravely and patiently, as you could, and I'm sure, ignorant as I am, that no one else could have in the conditions done it half so well. Only the conditions were so wrong that it's delightful they can at last be right. I'll wait for another day," she smiled, "to try my theory."
"What you'll wait for," he after a moment returned, "is evidently and more especially another person."
She shook her head in general relinquishment. "Another person will never turn up. There will always be a flaw. If he's worth one's idea he'll be sure to have been over. If he hasn't been over he'll be sure not to be worth one's idea. "You"—oh she could indeed, as he said, rub it in!—"would have been so perfectly worth it."
"Perhaps I might still try to be," he thoughtfully suggested, "if I could by any chance come as near to it as really to understand it. But I assure you I don't so much as to take hold of it."
She struck him for a moment as on the point, in answer to this, of breaking into impatience and declaring that his failure of comprehension needn't matter to him. He had a glimpse thus of what he believed—that she truly would have wished him to take her conception on trust, and, as it were, for the love of her; to oblige her by ​adopting it, by accommodating himself blindly. Her courage, however, he made out, was insufficient for this, and the next minute she only did for herself what she could. "That's because I'm at the disadvantage, which I perfectly recognise, of not having practised what I preach—because I naturally, in my position, have everything against me." She smiled again for the vanity of the regret, but she went on. "If I could have known how I was now to feel I would never have gone."
Ralph tried to follow her as if something might come of it. "But it took nothing less than your charming experience, I gather, to produce your actual attitude. You would have had no attitude without it. You had to qualify yourself for your remonstrance."
He spoke so gravely that it made, in effect, for irony, and that in turn just visibly made her flinch. "Well, I do of course hold myself qualified, and of course I'm glad to be, on any terms. I give it to you at best as mere inevitable reaction, but the point I make is that as reaction it's final. One must choose at last"—she couldn't, he saw, but let herself go; "and I take up definitely with my own country. It's high time; here, en fin de compte, one can at least do or be something, show something, make something. To try and make something is at all events what's wanted of us, and even if we make nothing it's at least ​as good to make it here on the spot as to go thousands of miles on as great a fool's errand. I want in short to be an American as other people are—well, whatever they are."
Ralph turned it all over. "Yes, it's the new cry, and what can be more interesting than to hear it sounded more or less in French? It's recommended—for the 'upper classes,' and perhaps even beginning a little to be tried by them. It wouldn't take much," he continued, "to make me say that the day only could inevitably come when it would be for its little hour the new pose."
"I dare say indeed it wouldn't take much to make you say it," she returned; "and I've also seen the moment coming at which—for the moment—you inevitably would. But I dare say you hold that the hour you speak of will pass: all the more reason therefore that I should make the most of it while it lasts. It may be only a dream, but the thing is—while one can—to keep dreaming."
He looked at her in silence longer than he had done yet. "What it comes to then is that you'll never dream of me."
"By no means; because it's just in dreams———!" But she pulled herself up. "I mean that their strangeness is their law. They, when they're happy, arrange everything to perfection. With you or without you at any rate," she pursued, "mine will go on. They'll be as fantastic as you please—that is as much about the poor product." ​She held him for a moment with this, then she broke out: "How shall we ever know his possibility unless we give him a chance? What I'm dying to see is the best we can turn out quite by ourselves."
He sacrificed his indifference. "The best young man?"
"Oh I don't care how old he is———"
"So long as he's young!" Poor Pendrel—for want of anything better to do—interrupted.
But she held her course. "The older he is the more he'll have given us time to see. Of course," she splendidly added, "he may be a failure, and, if he is, that will more or less settle the question. We're nowhere till it is settled."
Ralph showed on his side no less noble a patience. "But isn't it settled by the cowboy?"
"The cowboy?" she stared.
"Why isn't he what you want, and why isn't he good enough? He sometimes in spite of his calling, I believe, lives to a great age. There are cases surely in which he will have given you time to see, and he has the great merit of standing there ready to your hand. You talk about the 'question,' but what is he but the best answer to it that any conditions at all conceivable can yield? You say mine—my conditions—are wrong; so that what are his, logically, unless right? If he isn't right with them it would seem therefore their fault. I wonder it doesn't strike ​you in fine that if he isn't good enough your idea itself perhaps isn't." Now that Ralph was launched he felt the tide high. "That's what it comes to, your idea, dress it up as you will. You want a fellow only who shall have had adventures—and that, I hasten to grant, is any lady's right. There's no disputing about tastes, but that isn't true about principles. You want the adventure to have been, or necessarily to be, of the species most marked and determined by our climate, our geographical position, our political institutions, our social circumstances and our national character. It seems to me you see lines drawn remarkably sharp, but, allowing you that, I repeat that you strike me as having but to take your choice. The cow-boy," he suggested, "of middle-age, say———"
But she had now interrupted—as if for commiseration. "I don't even yet know what a cowboy is!"
It was at all events her seeing him gracelessly astray that she made him most feel. "There am I for you then. I don't know what anyone is who leads the life of action—so little am I such a creature myself." And straight—though he was sore for it—he looked the whole thing in the face. "It's my type itself that's impossible to you. I shouldn't even here," he averred, "be able to meet your views or do what you require. I'd be a brute for it if I could—as indeed I often wish I ​were one; but I'll be hanged if I see my way. My adventures are all in a very small circle"—and our young man tapped the seat of his brain. He thought it out at the moment almost as much for himself as for Aurora. "If it weren't that I'm trying to equip myself without disgrace in this one, I should doubt if in a fix of the kind that for you makes the hero I could be rightly counted on to know what to do. There you have me. Yes, it comes home to me: I only know what to do in thought or, as you might say, imagination—and but the least little bit even there; also without any firm confidence of doing it. So that if none but a ranchman need apply———!" he could in fine, while they dropped, with this, into their longest break, but look about for his hat. "I suppose it's no use my saying," he went on when he had found this article, "that if it interests you at all I may just possibly before long come in for something in England." He waited a little for her to take him up on it, but to the simple increase of his sense of her leaving him now to flounder as he would. He floundered accordingly an instant longer. "To me—to my mind of course I mean—such a windfall, in the shape of a bit of old property, an old house, a piece of suggestive concrete antiquity, easily represents, as you can conceive, rather a 'treat.' But I don't dream it's a thing to dazzle you with." He felt as soon as he had spoken, or rather as soon as her own ​silence had again marked itself, as if he had seen a vulgar bribe fall flat; and he was equally aware that what he next said deepened this appearance. "Of course there's nothing of that sort that can mean much to you to-day. You've seen everything again and again."
"Oh," she answered at last, "I've seen a great deal. But not what you will. You'll know so much better how. You've work cut out, but you're to be envied."
He put out his hand to her. "Good-bye—till next year."
For a moment she kept it. "Why do you talk so foolishly?"
"I say nothing more foolish than that I shall by that time see you again."
At this she slowly released him. "Of course it will be comparatively easy for you, but it won't really be worth your while to come back to spite me."
"I shall come back," said Ralph, "because I shall want to."
She had another of those weighted headshakes which, as if determined less from within than from without, suggested the perfect working of her beauty rather than that of her thought. "No—it's there that you're wrong and that I'm so right. I'm not such an idiot as not to know that there will always be a steamer and that you can always pay your passage. When I said that if you go ​you'll never come back I meant that you'll never wish to. Of course you can come back without wishing as much as you like. But that," she blandly remarked, "won't do for me."
"How well you know what I wish," he exhaled, "and how much every way you know about everything!"
"Well," she patiently replied before he had time finally to leave her, "it's not wholly my fault if an expression you once used to me has much worked in me. I remembered it as soon as I saw you to-day, and it would have made a folly of my talking to you of my conditions if I had done that with any other practical view than to call your attention to our impossibilities. You used it on one occasion when I was last at home in a way that has made me never forget it."
Ralph wondered. "I've used doubtless plenty of expressions and in plenty of absurd ways. But what in the world was this one?"
She brought it responsibly out. "'The sense of the past'."
He wondered still more. "Is that all?"
"You said it was the thing in life you desired most to arrive at, and that wherever you had found it—even where it was supposed to be most vivid and inspired—it had struck you as deplorably lacking intensity. At the intensity required, as you said, by any proper respect for itself, you proposed if possible yourself to arrive—art, ​research, curiosity, passion, the historic passion, as you called it, helping you. From that moment," she went on, "I saw. The sense of the past is your sense."
He attended with a cold eye. "I haven't an idea what trash I may have talked."
"Don't be dishonest," she returned after a moment.
It brought, almost as a blow, a flush to his cheek. "Dishonest?"
"Don't deny yourself. Don't deny your ambition. Don't deny your genius."
He looked at her over it strangely, and then as if light had really broken, "Are those things what you hate me for?" he almost gasped.
"Live up to them," she returned as if she had not heard him. "You won't do anything else." She said it with a shortness that was almost stern, and he felt, detestably, as if she had but one moment instructed and at the other derided him. "Isn't that moreover quite the lesson of the chance, the one you just mentioned, of what you may come in for? Isn't an old property for you the very finger of fortune, the very 'lead' of providence? Profit for heaven's sake by your old property. It will open your eyes." She went on with widened looks which so further ennobled her face that they held him by themselves, standing out as he did from any truth in them. "That's what your little book itself says—your little book ​that's so wonderful for a man uninitiated; by which I venture to mean, you see, a man untravelled. It's àpropos of what you call the 'backward vision.' and I could immediately find the page. 'There are particular places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that seem to put us into communication, and the spell is sometimes made to work by the imposition of hands, if it be patient enough, on an old object or an old surface.' It's very wonderful, you know, your having arrived at that, your having guessed it, in this place, which denies the old at every turn and contains so few such objects or surfaces." So she continued to comment. "I hope your old house will contain plenty of them."
Her quotation of this twaddle, as it struck him, from his small uninformed Essay, for which he now blushed, completed his disarray. Half a dozen things rose to his lips and stopped, but the bitterest got uttered. "What's most extraordinary is that illusion I was under about your own type. I had taken it," he explained, "as so beautifully suggestive."
"Suggestive of what?" his hostess asked.
He looked at her without meeting this and as for the last time. "And again it's all there. You would help me more than anyone. I feel it," he continued with his eyes on her face, "really not as a mistake. Essentially—well, you're one of them."
​"One of whom?"
"The women. The women. Good-bye," he said again and offering his hand as if their queer chasm had been bridged by this intensity of the personal question. It was as if he took something that she couldn't help giving, and what he took made him after an instant break out: "It will be you—I'll be hanged!—who will come."
But she was so firm and finished and high withal that even the ring of perception in this, or at least the rush of confidence, failed to make her wince. It only made her think to the very end of her goodnature. "I'll tell you what I'll do—if I can trust to your honour."
"You can trust to my honour," Pendrel said.
"Very well then, I promise you that if I find I want to—for that's the point—I'll loyally, bravely, and at whatever cost this time to my vanity, go back."
Pendrel weighed it. "Isn't there a danger that you'll take care not to find you want to?"
"Certainly a danger. I can do anything rather than want to. Anything, that is—I again promise you—short of marrying to save myself. It will take a miracle to move me, but if I am moved—moved from within and by something now incalculable—you may count on me. That," Aurora said, "is the meaning of my talking of my honour."
"And what's the meaning," Ralph asked, "of your talking of mine?"
​"Why, that I take in the same way my chance of yours." She paused—he must understand.
This took him indeed no great time. "You'll have me if I do come?"
She hesitated again but an instant. "If you come on your honour. If you come———!" But it was as if she couldn't put it.
He tried to help her. "Without regret?"
Ah this wasn't good enough. "If you come with desire."
Ralph stared. "How in the world can I come without it if I come for you?"
She used again her large ease. "That won't help you if you're loyal."
"Loyal?" he wondered.
"To the real truth. To your genius."
"Oh I'll take care of my genius!"
"You will," she presently returned, "if you remember well this: that if you do rejoin me you engage to me to stay."
"Very good—I shall remember it well."
"Good-bye then," said Aurora Coyne.
She saw him to the door, where he paused for a last light. "Does that mean you hold you're safe?"
"It means that I hold you are," she answered as she turned away.