“I sometimes see,” said Mrs. Watson. “I have sometimes seen more than it was intended for me to see.”
What could she mean by that? Ferdinand asked himself. And for an instant he was unpleasantly conscious again of the something ambiguous in her mood. Suddenly she turned and switched on the electric light in the room, and then went and stood by the window again. Ferdinand's psychic feathers were a trifle rumpled by the action. It was growing dusk... but he would have liked to talk to her in the twilight, looking out over the roofs.
“If we could only see into the hearts ... into the homes,” she mused yet again.
“If you could see into my heart now ... Alethea...”
He left the sentence unfinished. She did not look at him. She turned her face so he could not see it.
He tried to take her hand. But she avoided that, without actually moving, without giving ground... as a boxer in the ring may escape the full effect of a blow he does not parry by shrugging it off, without retreating.
After a moment's silence she said: “Ferdinand...” and paused....
He felt sure of her, then. He drew a long breath. He wished they were not standing by that window, framed in it, with the lighted room behind them... but since she _would_ stand there... anyhow, now was the time....
And then he heard himself pleading with her, eloquently, fervently. She was his ideal! She was... he hated the word “affinity,” because it had been cheapened and vulgarized by gross contacts... but she _was_ his affinity. They were made for one another. It was predestined that they should meet and love. She was what he needed to complete him, to fulfill him. They would go forth together... not into the world, but away from it... they would dwell upon the heights, and... and... so forth.
Ferdinand, as he pleaded, perhaps thought nothing consciously of the fact that she must be spending money at the rate of fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year. But, nevertheless, that subconscious mind of his, of which he had so often spoken, that subliminal self, must have been considering the figures, for suddenly there flashed before his inner eye the result of a mathematical calculation..._ fifty thousand dollars a year is the interest on one million dollars at five per cent_. Ah, that would make his dreams possible! How his service to the human race might be increased in value if all his time could be but given to carrying his message! Farewell to the sordid struggle for bread! And in the poetic depths of him there moved, unuttered, a phrase which he had spoken aloud earlier in the day: _“I shall never wash another dish, nor yet another undergarment_.” This secondary line of thought, however, did not interfere with the lyric passion of his speech.