Medway nodded. "I like a tolerant woman."
She rose and stood, regarding him with a twisted smile, affectionate and pitying. "I think that you are a fearfully selfish man--to quote Stevenson, quoted by Henley, 'an unconscious, easy, selfish person.' And I think that, of your own brand, you have grit and pluck and stamina for twenty men. There's no malice or envy in you, and you're intellectually honest, and you can be the best company in the world. I am very fond of you."
"Aren't you the selfish person not to be willing to go to Bogotá?"
"Perhaps--perhaps--" said Hagar Ashendyne, "but I am not willing."
"That is the first time you have asked me that.... Wandering is good, but it is not good for all of life. I want to return to my own country and to live there. I want to grow in my native forest and serve in my own place."
"To live at Gilead Balm with Bob and Serena?"
"No; I do not mean that precisely." Hagar pushed back her heavy hair. "I haven't thought it out perfectly. But it has grown to be wrong to me, personally, to wander, wander forever like this--irresponsible, brushing life with moth wings.... If I saw any end to it ... but I do not--"
"And you wish to cut the painter? This comes," said Medway, "of the damned modern independence of women. If you couldn't write--couldn't earn--you'd trot along quietly enough! The pivotal mistake was letting women learn the alphabet."
"I could always have taken a position as housemaid," said Hagar serenely. "You can't make me angry, and so get the best of me. And you like me better, knowing the alphabet, and there's no use in your denying it.... If only you would conceive that it were possible for you to return to America, to take a house, to _live_ there. And still you could travel--sometimes with me, sometimes without me--travel often if you pleased and far and wide.... Would it be so distasteful?"
"Profoundly so," said Medway. "It is idle to talk of it. I should be bored to extinction.--What is your alternative?"
"I shall be glad to spend three months out of every year with you."
"Suppose you do not begin the arrangement until next year? Then we can still go to Bogotá."
"All life," said Medway, "is based upon compromise."
Hagar, pacing to and fro, in her soft dull-green cotton with its fine deep collar of valenciennes, stopped now before the purple irises and now before the white. "Had I not appeared by your bedside in Alexandria, eight years ago, had I not been at hand during that convalescence for you to grow a little fond of, you would have, all these years, taken Thomson and Mahomet and gone to every place where we have gone, just the same,--just the same,--and with, I hardly doubt, just as full enjoyment. If you had not liked me, you would, with the entirest equanimity, have bidden me good-bye and seen me return with grandfather to Gilead Balm, and you would have travelled on, finding and making friends, acquaintances, and servants as you do to so remarkable a degree, missing not one station or event. If I died to-day, you would do every proper thing--and in the autumn proceed to Bogotá."