The strong like to be leaned upon and the weak to lean, and this irrespective of sex.  This was the solution she woke up with one morning, and it seemed to explain not only David’s and Elspeth’s love, but her own, so clearly that in her desire to help she put it before Tommy.  It implied that she cared for him because he was weak, and he drew a very long face.

“You don’t know how the feathers hurt as they come out,” he explained.

“But so long as we do get them out!” she said.

“Every other person who knows me thinks that strength is my great characteristic,” he maintained, rather querulously.

“But when you know it is not,” said Grizel.  “You do know, don’t you?” she asked anxiously.  “To know the truth about one’s self, that is the beginning of being strong.”

“You seem determined,” he retorted, “to prevent my loving you.”

“Why?” she asked.

“You are to make me strong in spite of myself, I understand.  But, according to your theory, the strong love the weak only.  Are you to grow weak, Grizel, as I grow strong?”

She had not thought of that, and she would have liked to rock her arms.  But she was able to reply:  “I am not trying to help you in order to make you love me; you know, quite well, that all that is over and done with.  I am trying only to help you to be what a man should be.”

She could say that to him, but to herself?  Was she prepared to make a man of him at the cost of his possible love?  This faced her when she was alone with her passionate nature, and she fought it, and with her fists clenched she cried:  “Yes, yes, yes!”

Do we know all that Grizel had to fight?  There were times when Tommy’s mind wandered to excuses for himself; he knew what men were, and he shuddered to think of the might have been, had a girl who could love as Grizel did loved such a man as her father.  He thanked his Maker, did Tommy, that he, who was made as those other men, had avoided raising passions in her.  I wonder how he was so sure.  Do we know all that Grizel had to fight?

* * * * *

They spoke much during those days of the coming parting, and she always said that she could bear it if she saw him go away more of a man than he had come.

“Then anything I have suffered or may suffer,” she told him, “will have been done to help you, and perhaps in time that will make me proud of my poor little love-story.  It would be rather pitiful, would it not, if I have gone through so much for no end at all?”

She spoke, he said, almost reproachfully, as if she thought he might go away on his wings, after all.

“We can’t be sure,” she murmured, she was so eager to make him watchful.

“Yes,” he said, humbly but firmly, “I may be a scoundrel, Grizel, I am a scoundrel, but one thing you may be sure of, I am done with sentiment.”  But even as he said it, even as he felt that he could tear himself asunder for being untrue to Grizel, a bird was singing at his heart because he was free again, free to go out into the world and play as if it were but a larger den.  Ah, if only Tommy could always have remained a boy!