"Am I?" He looked at her, blanched and sorrowful. "Am I, Rose?"
"You know you do, and then you refuse to take the simple, sweet, faithful way with me."
She did not even flush at the words, sprung from a great sincerity.
"Shall I ask you? Shall I ask you to let me take your name and live with you, and be true to you?"
They looked at each other in the terrible recognition that brings souls almost too close.
"You are a great woman, my dear," said Osmond. He rose and stood before her. "Look at me. I hate my body. Could you love it?"
"I do love it," said the woman. "And I love your soul. And I am ashamed to think we can know the things we have known and then think of the bodies we live in. Grannie believes in immortal life. I believe in it too, since I have known you."
"There are a good many hours, my dear, when we forget immortal life. The world goes hard with us. In those times, shall you look at me and hate me?"
"I shall look at you and love you, stupid!" she said. "Oh, how little men know!"
"And then," he was continuing, in his bitter honesty, "I am a laboring man. I told Peter you were a terrible Parisian."
"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing, because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about labor!"
"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,--the ones that work blindly out of the light,--I see them as Ivan Gorof saw them, that great sea of the oppressed."
"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied than the rich. And I keep wishing for them, not money and power and leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish the rich had, too."
"The heart that sees God, grannie would say."
"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in flowers."