He could not reply at once; and she let him sit in silence, looking across
the garden while she took up her knitting from the end of the bench, and
leaning lightly toward him, measured a few rows of stitches across his
wrist. It gave way under her touch.
"These are your mittens for next winter," she said softly, more softly than
he had ever heard her speak. And the quieting melody of her mere tone!--how
unlike that other voice which bored joyously into you as a bright gimlet
twists its unfeeling head into wood. He turned on her one quick, beautiful
look of gratitude.
"What was it about the harvest?" she repeated, forbearing to return his
look, and thinking that all his embarrassment followed from the pain of
having thus met Amy.
He began to speak very slowly:
"The last time I was here I boasted that I had yet to meet my first great
defeat in life . . . that there was nothing stronger in the world than a
man's will and purpose . . . that if ideals got shattered, we shattered them
. . . that I would go on doing with my life as I had planned, be what I
wished, have what I wanted."
"Well?" she urged, busy with her needles.
"I know better now."
"Aren't you the better for knowing better?"
He made no reply; so that she began to say very simply and as a matter of
course:
"It's the defeat more than anything else that hurts you! Defeat is always
the hardest thing for you to stand, even in trifles. But don't you know that
we have to be defeated in order to succeed? Most of us spend half our lives
in fighting for things that would only destroy us if we got them. A man who
has never been defeated is usually a man who has been ruined. And, of
course," she added with light raillery, "of course there are things stronger
than the strongest will and purpose: the sum of other men's wills and
purposes, for instance. A single soldier may have all the will and purpose
to whip an army, but he doesn't do it. And a man may have all the will and
purpose to whip the world, walk over it rough-shod, shoulder it out of his
way as you'd like to do, but he doesn't do it. And of course we do not
shatter our ideals ourselves--always: a thousand things outside ourselves do
that for us. And what reason had you to say that you would have what you
wanted? Your wishes are not infallible. Suppose you craved the forbidden?"