Lois took a step back toward the girl. "You mean that it doesn't make any difference to you what he does?"

She shook her head. "No; not now; not--not any more."

"That is, you've given him up?"

Rosie sought for an explanation. "I haven't given him up. I only--_see_."

"You see what, Rosie?"

"Oh, I don't know. It's--it's like having had a dream--a strange, awful dream--and waking from it."

"Waking from it?"

Rosie nodded. She made a further effort to explain. "After I--I did--what I did--that day at Duck Rock--everything was different. I can't describe it. It was like dying--and coming back. It was like--like waking."

"Do you mean that what happened before seemed--unreal?"

She nodded again. "Yes, that's it. It was like a play." But she corrected herself quickly. "No; it wasn't like a play. It was more than that. It was like a dream--an awful dream--but a dream you like--a dream you'd go through again. No; you wouldn't go through it again--it would kill you." She grew incoherent. "Oh, I don't know--I don't know. It's gone--just gone. I don't say it wasn't real. It _was_ real. It was a kind of frenzy. It got hold of me. It got hold of me body and soul. I couldn't think of anything else--while it lasted."

Lois was pained. "Oh, but, Rosie, love can't come and go like that."

"Can't it? Then it wasn't love." But she contradicted herself again.

"Yes, it _was_ love. It was love--while it lasted."

While it lasted! While it lasted! The phrase seemed to be on every one's lips. There was distress in Lois's voice as she said, "But if it was love, Rosie, it ought to have lasted."

And Rosie seemed to agree with her. "Yes, it ought to have. But it didn't. It went away. No, it didn't go away; it just--it just--_wasn't_." She wrung her hands, struggling with the difficulty she found in explaining herself. "After that day at Duck Rock it was like--it was like the breaking of a spell that was on me. Everything was different. It was like seeing through plain daylight again after looking through colored gla.s.s. I didn't want the things I'd been wanting. They were foolish to me--I _saw_ they were foolish--and--and impossible. But it wasn't as if they had died; it was as if I had--and come back."

It was on behalf of love that Lois felt driven to make a protest. "And yet, Rosie, if you were to see Claude again--"

"No, no, no," the girl cried, excitedly; "I don't want to see him. He needn't stay away--not on my account--but I sha'n't see him if I can help it. It would be like dying the second time. All the same, he needn't be afraid of me; and his family needn't be afraid of me. I want to--to forget them all."

Enlightenment came slowly to Lois because of her unwillingness to be convinced of the heart's capriciousness. That love could be likened to brain-storm--obsession--the tornado whose rage dies out in an afternoon--was a wound to her tenderest beliefs. That the natural man must be taken into consideration as well as the spiritual also did violence to what she would have liked to make a serene, smooth theory of life. She stood looking long at the girl, studying her subconsciously, before she was able to say, calmly: "Very well, Rosie, dear. I'll let Claude know. I can get his address, and I'll write to him."

But another surprise was in store for her. She was near the door leading from the hothouse when she became aware that Rosie was behind her, and heard the same little gasping cry as before. "Mrs. Masterman! I want to ask you something!" Lois had hardly looked round when the girl went on again. "You know father and mother. They think the world of you--mother especially. Do you suppose they'd mind very much if I--if I turned?"

Lois was puzzled. "If you did what, Rosie?"

"If I turned; if I turned Catholic."

"Oh!"

The reformed tradition was strong in Lois. She was prepared to defend it by argument and with affection. For a minute she was almost on the point of stating the historical Protestant position when she was deterred by the thought of Dr. Sim. What would he have said to Rosie? She remembered suddenly something that he once did say: "If you can seize any one aspect of the Christian religion, do it--for the least of them all will save you."

Remembering this, Lois withheld her arguments, asking the non-committal question, "Why should you think of doing that?"

Rosie flushed. "Oh, I don't know. I've been"--she hung her head--"I've been pretty bad, you know. I've told lies--and I--I tried to kill myself--and everything."

"And you think you'd get more help that way than any other?"

"Oh, I don't know. I went twice lately--not here--in town. It frightened me. I--I liked it."

Had Lois dared she would have asked if Jim Breen had inspired this sudden change, but she said, merely: "Oh, I don't believe your father and mother would feel badly in the end--not if it brought comfort to you, Rosie dear. Is it that you want me to talk to them?--to help you out?"

Rosie nodded silently, and with face averted in a kind of shame.

"Very well, then, I will." She felt it due to her own convictions to add: "Perhaps I can do it all the better because--because my personal opinions are the other way. They'll see I'm only seeking whatever may make for your happiness." There was silence for a few seconds before she said, in conclusion, "And oh! Rosie dear, I do hope you'll be happy, after all--all that's been so hard for you."

Rosie was too strong and self-contained to cry, but there was a mist in her eyes as they shook hands again and parted.

That night Lois wrote to her husband: "You ask me, dear Thor, if I see my way yet, and frankly I can't say that I do. I begin, however, to wonder if there is not a reason for my remaining puzzled and so long in the dark. I begin to ask if I know what love is--if anybody knows what it is. Do you? If so, what is it? Is it the same thing for every one? or does it differ with individuals? Is it a temporary thing?--or a permanent thing?--or does it matter? Is it one of the highest promptings we have?--or one of the lowest?--or is it that primary impulse of animate nature which when developed and perfected leads to G.o.d? Is there a spiritual man and a carnal man, each with a love that can conflict with the love of the other? Is the one man on the side of the angels, as Uncle Sim would say, and the other man on that of the flesh, till the stronger gains the victory? Or is there something in love of the nature of obsession? Does it come and go like the tornado--as violent in its pa.s.sage, but as quickly pa.s.sed? Thor, darling, I begin to be afraid of love. If we are to start again I want it to be on some other ground--a new ground--a ground we don't know anything about as yet, but which perhaps we shall discover."

CHAPTER XXIX

Thorley Masterman pondered on the words Lois had written him as he tramped along the bluffs above the Mississippi, with the towers and spires of Minneapolis looming like battlements through the haze of an afternoon at the end of June. He had left the conference on new methods of treating the thyroid gland which was being held in St. Paul in order to think his position out. Having motored over from his hotel in Minneapolis, he preferred to "tramp it" back. The glorious wooded way on the St. Paul side of the river was in itself an invitation to his strong, striding limbs, while the wine of Western air and the stimulus of Western energy quickened the savage outdoor impulse so ready to leap in his blood. The song of mating birds quickened it, too, and the romance of the river gliding through the gorge below, and the beauty of the cities eying each other like embattled queens from headland across to headland and through the splendor of the promise of a gold-and-purple sunset.

It was a great setting for great thoughts, inspiring ideas so large that when he reached his hotel he found them too big to reduce easily to paper.

"You ask me what love is, and say you don't know. I'm more daring than you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even if I don't know all.

"For one thing, I know that no one can do more than say what love is for himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't, or must be, or ought to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is, or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. No two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations--I'm not speaking of you and me in particular--arise from the fact that, giving one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no one else has that special quality to offer? The flower is different according to the plant that produces it. When the pine-tree loved the palm there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the other.

"Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is that what one gives should be one's best--the very blossom of one's soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented, flowerless bloom of the elm or the linden that falls like manna in the roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations; but it is worth noticing that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion as nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends something to the hibiscus--the hibiscus to the elm. Neither can expect back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each offers what it can.

"Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love--that it exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outward, to pour forth, to express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no yard-stick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian theology is that your G.o.d is love. Given a G.o.d who is Love and a Love that is G.o.d, I can see Him as worthy to be worshiped. Call Him, then, by any name you please--Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ--you still have the Essence, the _Thing_. Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as nearly infinite as anything human can be. When I can't pour it out in that way--when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point beyond which I see that I cannot go any further--I do not truly love."

Having written this much, he laid down his pen and considered. He had said nothing personal, unless it was by implication. It was only after long meditation that he decided to leave the matter there. The prime question was no longer as to whether or not he loved her, but as to whether or not she loved him. That was for her to decide. It was for her to decide without his urging or tormenting. He began to feel not only too sensitive on the subject, but too proud to make appeals to which she would probably listen out of generosity. Since he had been in the wrong, it was for her to make the advances; and so he ended his letter and posted it.

The discussion continued throughout the correspondence that ensued while he migrated from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, from Milwaukee to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs. It was partly from curiosity of travel that he zigzagged in this way across the country, and partly to make it plain to Lois without saying it that he awaited her permission to come home. That he should be obliged to return one day, without her permission if not with it, was a matter of course, but it would make the meeting easier if she summoned him. As a hint that she could do so and have no fear, he asked her in a postscript to one of his letters to tell him, when she next wrote, what was happening to Rosie Fay.

To this she replied as simply and straightforwardly as he had put the question, imparting all that Jim Breen had told her and whatever she had gleaned for herself, adding as a seeming afterthought in the letter she wrote next day:

"If Rosie _could_ bring herself to marry Jim it would be the happiest of all solutions, and make things easier for Claude. I think she will. If so, it won't be so much because her heart will have been caught in the rebound as that the poor little thing is mentally and emotionally exhausted, and glad to creep into the arms of any strong, good man who will love her and take care of her. Just to be able to do that much will be enough for Jim. I see a good deal of him; so I know. Every time he brings an order of new plants we have a little talk--always about Rosie.

His love is of the kind you wrote about the other day; it has no yard-stick for the little more or the little less in the return. Perhaps men can love like that more easily than women do. Uncle Sim seemed to hint one evening that there is generally a selfish strain in a woman's love, in that what it gets is more precious to it than what it gives. I wonder."

Thor received these two letters together on returning to Colorado Springs from a day's visit to that high wilderness in which John Hay sought freedom from interruption in writing his _Life of Lincoln_. He understood fully that Lois was deliberately being cruel in order to be kind. The very s.p.a.cing out of her information over two separate days was meant to impress him and at the same time to spare. Things would be easier for Claude, she said, when she meant that they would be easier for him.

But for him it was a matter of indifference. That is, it was the same kind of matter of indifference that pain becomes in a limb that has grown benumbed. For reasons he could hardly explain, that part of his being to which Rosie Fay had made her pathetic appeal couldn't feel any more. It was like something atrophied from over-strain. There was the impulse to suffer, but no suffering. Moreover, he was sure that though these nerves might one day vibrate again, they could never do so otherwise than reminiscently. To the episode he felt as a mother might feel to the dead child she has never been able to acknowledge as her own. It was something buried, and yet sacred--sacred in spite of the fact that it never should have been. As an incident in his life it had brought keen joy and keener pain, but he had already outlived both. He had outlived them as apparently Rosie had outlived them herself--not by the pa.s.sage of time, but by an intensity of experience which seemed to have covered years.

He came to this conclusion not instinctively, nor all at once, but by dint of reflection, as he sat on the broad terrace of the hotel, watching the transformation scene that takes place in the Rockies during the half-hour before sunset. His pipe was in his mouth; Lois's letters lay open on the little table he had drawn up beside his chair. Other tourists bore him company, scattered singly or in groups, smoking and drinking tea. A mild suggestion of Europe, a suggestion of Cap Martin or of Cannes, was blocked by the domes of the great range and by a shifting interplay of magic lights where his eye was impelled to look for the broad, still levels of Mediterranean blue.

There was a wonder in the moment which the yearning in his spirit was tempted to take as symbolic, and perhaps prophetic, of his future. Where all day long he had seen nothing but hard ridges packed against one another, without water, without snow, without perspective, without a shred of mist, without a hint of mystery, without anything to set the mind to wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges, pierced by valleys, glens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with the harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant vegetation, soft vapors rose insensibly--purple, pink, and orange--changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and furrowed the deep pa.s.ses and put the horizon infinitely far away. The trans.m.u.tation from conditions in which Nature herself seemed for once to be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of glory into glory, of color into color, and of form into form, rising, mingling, melting, fading, rising and mingling again, melting again, fading again, pa.s.sing swiftly in a last brief recrudescence from gold into green and from green into black, with the hurried eclipse and the sudden tranquillity of night--the trans.m.u.tation which produced all this was to Thor hopeful and in its way inspiriting. In the last rays of light he drew out his fountain-pen and the scribbling-book he kept for notes by the way, writing quickly without preamble or formality.