“Possibly not. The mind of the thinker is always daring storm and shipwreck. Mentally I am a species of Raleigh, ever promising myself an El Dorado, a dream that other people always quash. I find my friends the surest iconoclasts of my ideals.”
Judith halted under the great cedar; green grass stretched brilliant at her feet; the western sunlight shone upon her face.
“Your very words betray you. You are flippant.”
“Men are often flippant when they are most in earnest,” he answered her. “Little woman, you create moral problems unnecessarily.”
Judith withstood him, gracious and beautifully eager.
“I will ask you a simple question,” she said. “Would you be happier if at this moment you were free?”
He hung his head and looked into the gloom of the trees.
“No one is free from the cradle. We are beset by eternal obligations.”
“Life is one long obligation. I only maintain the inevitable.”
The man laughed, half cynically, yet with a wistful scorn.
“There are many things you do not understand,” he said.
Judith shook her head and looked long at him out of her large eyes.
“My heart tells me that all is not well with you,” she said.
Her brother gazed at her with a smile of melancholy tenderness.
“Judith,” he answered her, “why worry yourself over my future. A man may often repent; he can rarely alter. By my own deeds I have made this match inevitable. You can only pain me by suggesting impossibilities. I have incurred a debt—a debt heavier than you can guess. I am happier in doing my duty as a man of honor than I should be in playing the craven. You have the truth.”
Judith hid her eyes from him under her lashes.
“Men pledge themselves to an error and spend their blood in justifying it.”
“True sincerity never errs,” she said. “It looks ahead and deceives not the future. The greatest strength is that which emancipates itself from a moral lie.”
“Well and good,” he answered her; “but sheer egotism is unpardonable under certain circumstances.”
“It is the false egotism that in the beginning shackles the true.”
“Then must the true try to remedy the false. We all err. Errors are the illegitimate offspring of the soul; as their parents, we must maintain them. They are ours and of us. The laws of society saddle us with the responsibility. My dear girl, say no more.”