She laughed out merrily, but she did not look at him.
"Yes," she continued, trying to drain his cup for him, since he would not do
it himself, "you are the last man in the world to do a woman like Amy
justice. I'm afraid you will never do justice to any woman, unless you
change a good deal and learn a good deal. Perhaps no woman will ever
understand you--except me."
She looked up at him now with the clearest fondness in her exquisite eyes.
With a groan he suddenly leaned over and buried his face in his hands. His
hat fell over on the grass. Her knitting dropped to her lap, and one of her
hands went out quickly toward his big head, heavy with its shaggy reddish
mass of hair, which had grown long during his sickness. But at the first
touch she quickly withdrew it, and stooping over picked up his hat and put
it on her knees, and sat beside him silent and motionless.
He straightened himself up a moment later, and keeping his face turned away
reached for his hat and drew it down over his eyes.
"I can't tell you! You don't understand!" he said in a broken voice.
"I understand everything. Amy has told me-poor little Amy! She is not wholly
to blame. I blame you more. You may have been in love with your idea of her,
but anything like that idea she never has been and never will be; and who is
responsible for your idea, then, but yourself? It is a mistake that many a
man makes; and when the woman disappoints him, he blames her, and deserts
her or makes her life a torment. Of course a woman may make the same
mistake; but, as a rule, women are better judges of men than men are of
women. Besides, if they find themselves mistaken, they bear their
disappointment better and show it less: they alone know their tragedy; it is
the unperceived that kills."
The first tears that he had ever seen gathered and dimmed her eyes. She was
too proud either to acknowledge them or to hide them. Her lids fell quickly
to curtain them in, and the lashes received them in their long, thick
fringes. But she had suffered herself to go too far.
"Ah, if you had loved her! loved her!" she cried with an intensity of
passion, a weary, immeasurable yearning, that seemed to come from a life in
death. The strength of that cry struck him as a rushing wind strikes a young
eagle on the breast, lifting him from his rock and setting him afloat on the
billows of a rising storm. His spirit mounted the spirit of her unmated
confession, rode it as its master, exulted in it as his element and his
home. But the stricken man remained motionless on the bench a few feet from
the woman, looking straight across the garden, with his hands clinched about
his knees, his hat hiding his eyes, his jaws set sternly with the last grip
of resolution.