Carrie was listening without attempting to reply.  She could think of nothing worth while to say.  Despite all the ideas concerning right which had troubled her vaguely since she had last seen him, she was now influenced again strongly in his favor.

“I came out here to-day,” he went on, solemnly, “to tell you just how I feel—­to see if you wouldn’t listen to me.”

Hurstwood was something of a romanticist after his kind.  He was capable of strong feelings—­often poetic ones—­and under a stress of desire, such as the present, he waxed eloquent.  That is, his feelings and his voice were colored with that seeming repression and pathos which is the essence of eloquence.

“You know,” he said, putting his hand on her arm, and keeping a strange silence while he formulated words, “that I love you?” Carrie did not stir at the words.  She was bound up completely in the man’s atmosphere.  He would have churchlike silence in order to express his feelings, and she kept it.  She did not move her eyes from the flat, open scene before her.  Hurstwood waited for a few moments, and then repeated the words.

“You must not say that,” she said, weakly.

Her words were not convincing at all.  They were the result of a feeble thought that something ought to be said.  He paid no attention to them whatever.

“Carrie,” he said, using her first name with sympathetic familiarity, “I want you to love me.  You don’t know how much I need some one to waste a little affection on me.  I am practically alone.  There is nothing in my life that is pleasant or delightful.  It’s all work and worry with people who are nothing to me.”

As he said this, Hurstwood really imagined that his state was pitiful.  He had the ability to get off at a distance and view himself objectively—­of seeing what he wanted to see in the things which made up his existence.  Now, as he spoke, his voice trembled with that peculiar vibration which is the result of tensity.  It went ringing home to his companion’s heart.

“Why, I should think,” she said, turning upon him large eyes which were full of sympathy and feeling, “that you would be very happy.  You know so much of the world.”

“That is it,” he said, his voice dropping to a soft minor, “I know too much of the world.”

It was an important thing to her to hear one so well-positioned and powerful speaking in this manner.  She could not help feeling the strangeness of her situation.  How was it that, in so little a while, the narrow life of the country had fallen from her as a garment, and the city, with all its mystery, taken its place?  Here was this greatest mystery, the man of money and affairs sitting beside her, appealing to her.  Behold, he had ease and comfort, his strength was great, his position high, his clothing rich, and yet he was appealing to her.  She could formulate no thought which would be just and right.  She troubled herself no more upon the matter.  She only basked in the warmth of his feeling, which was as a grateful blaze to one who is cold.  Hurstwood glowed with his own intensity, and the heat of his passion was already melting the wax of his companion’s scruples.