The Choir Invisible

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.