"What?"
"Everything he had," answered Norris abruptly. "Do you think I have not
watched his courage and ideals wither as if they had been frosted? He is
numb. 'Heavy as frost,' Wordsworth said, and that's the weightiest
figure he could find. It did not take her a month to begin to change
him. In three months she has him well started. Isn't it a pity that the
worse one of the two should have the controlling force? But Dick's very
volatility that we love has laid him open to this thing."
"I'm glad," said Madeline slowly, "that he has his political interest."
"Yes, he's going into it with a kind of fury."
"Won't that give him a big outlet?"
"He may get a lot of satisfaction and do a really creditable thing."
"Your tone does not sound very hopeful."
"A single interest in life may accomplish more for the world, but I
don't believe it is very satisfactory for one's self."
Madeline looked at him inquiringly.
"God gives us of His own creative power," he said reverently, and there
came into his very practical face that dreamy look which she had seen
there once or twice before. "He supplies us with the raw materials of
the universe, gold and beauty and food and desire--and love--and He bids
us out of these things to build a man. We can't build a successful man
if we use only one ingredient. We get a complete man only when we use
them all."
Madeline stared off across the waters, and Ellery watched her over
shipped oars. At last he said, "But are you going to think only of Dick,
and Dick, and Dick for ever?"
She turned on him a face flushed but utterly frank.
"I know what you are thinking," she said. "But you are mistaken, quite
mistaken." And she met his eyes squarely in spite of her heightened
color. "At this very moment I was thinking more of you than of him," she
added.
"And what of me?"
"I was thinking how I misread you at first. I thought you a kind of
grub."
"And now?"
"That you are dogged and persistent; and that therefore you stick to
your ideals better than he."
"Do you know how comparatively easy that is, even for a plodder, when
his ideals are set up before him in visible form, so that he can not
forget them by day or by night? I wonder if you can realize what it
means to have a face like yours looking up from every dirty strip of
galley-proof, and a voice like yours sounding under the rumble of the
big presses. It's something of a possession for an every-day man." A
soft glow that might have been a trick of the spring sun spread over
Madeline's face. There is no thought more intoxicating to a girl than to
feel that she stands to a man for his ideals. A long sweet silence fell
between them, while she mused on this thing, and he watched her in tense
anxiety.