“And yet you have just declared that power appeals to you!”

“Power—­yes.  But a woman—­a woman like me—­wants to be first, or nothing.”

“You are first,” I asserted.  “You always have been, if you had only realized it.”

She gazed up at me dreamily.

“If you had only realized it!  If you had only realized that all I wanted of you was to be yourself.  It wasn’t what you achieved.  I didn’t want you to be like Ralph or the others.”

“Myself?  What are you trying to say?”

“Yourself.  Yes, that is what I like about you.  If you hadn’t been in such a hurry—­if you hadn’t misjudged me so.  It was the power in you, the craving, the ideal in you that I cared for—­not the fruits of it.  The fruits would have come naturally.  But you forced them, Hugh, for quicker results.”

“What kind of fruits?” I asked.

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “how can I tell what they might have been!  You have striven and striven, you have done extraordinary things, but have they made you any happier? have you got what you want?”

I stooped down and seized her wrists from behind her head.

“I want you, Nancy,” I said.  “I have always wanted you.  You’re more wonderful to-day than you have ever been.  I could find myself—­with you.”

She closed her eyes.  A dreamy smile was on her face, and she lay unresisting, very still.  In that tremendous moment, for which it seemed I had waited a lifetime, I could have taken her in my arms—­and yet I did not.  I could not tell why:  perhaps it was because she seemed to have passed beyond me—­far beyond—­in realization.  And she was so still!

“We have missed the way, Hugh,” she whispered, at last.

“But we can find it again, if we seek it together,” I urged.

“Ah, if I only could!” she said.  “I could have once.  But now I’m afraid—­afraid of getting lost.”  Slowly she straightened up, her hands falling into her lap.  I seized them again, I was on my knees in front of her, before the fire, and she, intent, looking down at me, into me, through me it seemed—­at something beyond which yet was me.

“Hugh,” she asked, “what do you believe?  Anything?”

“What do I believe?”

“Yes.  I don’t mean any cant, cut-and-dried morality.  The world is getting beyond that.  But have you, in your secret soul, any religion at all?  Do you ever think about it?  I’m not speaking about anything orthodox, but some religion—­even a tiny speck of it, a germ—­harmonizing with life, with that power we feel in us we seek to express and continually violate.”

“Nancy!” I exclaimed.

“Answer me—­answer me truthfully,” she said....

I was silent, my thoughts whirling like dust atoms in a storm.

“You have always taken things—­taken what you wanted.  But they haven’t satisfied you, convinced you that that is all of life.”

“Do you mean—­that we should renounce?” I faltered.