"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We must not stop being frank with each other now."
She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never did in the old days, you never even thought of it."
Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."
"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just loneliness and propinquity?"
Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart; how could I help loving you?"
"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long. But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too much about it. And I am older than you."
He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I don't know how much, two or three years--"
"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes, whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband; but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"