“I wish I could believe it,” he replied.  “The poor man is, as a rule, natural.  The rich man has the taste of other things on his palate; he has looked over the wrong wall, he apes what he sees in the wrong garden.”

“Not always,” she pleaded.  “Don’t you believe that something will remain of these splendid months of yours—­some will power, some faint impulse towards the choicer ways of life?  Oh, it really must be so!” she went on, more confidently.  “I am sure of it.  I think of you as you are now, how carefully you control even your emotions, how sensitive you always are in your speech, and I know that you could never revert entirely to those other days.  You may slip back, and slip back a long way, but there would always be something to keep you from the depths.”

Her eyes were glowing.  Her fingers deliberately touched his for a moment.

“It is wonderful to hope that it may be so,” he sighed.  “Even as I sit here and remember that awful picnic party, I remember, too, that something drew me a little away from the others to gaze into your garden and at you.  There was something, even then, which kept me from being with them while I looked, and I know that at that moment, at the moment I looked up and met your eyes, I know that there was no vulgar thought in my heart.”

“Dear,” she said, “with every word you make me the more inclined to persist.  I honestly believe that father and Mr. Bomford are right.  It is your duty.  You owe it to yourself to accept their offer.”

He sat for several minutes without speech.

“If I could only make you understand!” he went on at last.  “Somehow, I feel as though it would be making almost a vulgar use of something which is to me divine.  These strange little things which Mr. Bomford would have me barter for money, brought me out of the unclean world and showed me how beautiful life might be—­showed me, indeed, what beauty really is.  There is no religion has ever brought such joy to the heart of a man, nor any love, nor any of the great passions of the world have opened such gates as they have done for me.  You can’t imagine what the hideous life is like—­the life of vulgar days, of ugly surroundings, the dull and ceaseless trudge side by side with the multitude across the sterile plain, without the power to raise one’s eyes, without the power to stretch out one’s arms and feel the throb of freedom in one’s pulses.  If I die to-morrow, I shall at least have lived for a little time, thanks to these.  Can you wonder that I think of them with reverence?  Yet you ask me to make use of one of them to help launch upon the world a patent food, something built upon the credulity of fools, something whose praises must be sung in blatant advertisements, desecrating the pages of magazines, gaping from the hoardings, thrust inside the chinks of human simplicity by the art of the advertising agent.  Edith, it is a hard thing, this.  Do try and realize how hard it is.  If there be anything in the world divine, if there be anything sacred at all, anything to lift one from the common way, it is what you ask me to sacrifice.”