"Nothing that you would understand," he answered coldly. "I mean that you would not understand its significance. Nothing, perhaps, that I ought not to be prepared for."
She looked across the table at him with cold expressionless eyes. To see these two together in their moments of intimacy, no one would ever imagine that her love for this boy--he was nothing more when chance had thrown him in her way--had been the only real passion of her later days.
"You do not know," she said, "what I understand or what I do not understand. Tell me what it is that worries you in that letter."
"I asked a friend--a man named Chambers--to put me up for a club I wanted to join," he said. "He promised to do his best. I have just received a letter advising me to withdraw. The committee would not elect me."
"The 'Wanderers'," he answered. "The social qualification is not very stringent. I imagined that they would elect me."
The woman looked at him as one seeking to understand some creature of an alien world.
"You attach importance," she asked, "to such an incident as this? You?"
"Not real importance, perhaps," he answered, "only you must remember that these are the small things that annoy. They amount to nothing really. I know that. And yet they sting!"
"Do not dwell upon the small things, then," she said coldly. "It is well, for all our sakes, that you should occupy some position in the social world, but it is also well that you should remember that your position there is not worth a snap of the fingers as against the great things which you and I know of. What do these people matter, with their strange ideas of birth and position, their little social distinctions, which remind one of nothing so much as Swift's famous satire? You are losing your sense of proportion, my dear Bertrand. Go into your study for an hour this morning, and think. Listen to the voices of the greater life. Remember that all these small happenings are of less account than the flight of a bird on a summer's day."
"You are right," he answered, with a little sigh, "and yet you must remember that you and I can scarcely look at things from the same standpoint. They do not affect you in the slightest. They cannot fail to remind me that I am after all an outcast, rescued from shipwreck by one strange turn in the wheel of chance."