"What are you going to do now?" he asked after a pause. "After you get home, I mean?"
"I don't know. Work, I suppose, at something."
"Oh, I suppose so.--No, I'd rather do something harder, like stenography--something with a lot of dull, grinding routine. That's the best way."
"Or a matron in a home.--Why not? I must do something. I won't live with Mama, that's flat."
"You wouldn't expect me to stay here and--?"
"No, but couldn't you find something to do here as well as there?"
"Yes, but why? I suppose I want to go home, things being as they are. If I've got to live somewhere, I'd rather live among my own people. I didn't come here because I liked America best...."
"But are you sure you don't like America best now? You can't have lived here all these years without letting the place have its effect on you, however little you may have thought about it. Why, your very speech shows it! And what about your friends--haven't you got as many on this side as the other? You've practically admitted it.... And do you realize what construction is sure to be put on your leaving just now...?"
"What are you driving at?" She looked quickly up at him, curious in spite of herself to discover the trend of his arguments, in themselves scarcely worth answering. He did not reply for a moment, but stared gravely back at her, and when he spoke again it was from a different angle.
"Beatrice, why have you been telling me all these things...?"
He knew what he was going to do now, what he was striving toward with the whole strength of his newly-forged determination. And if at the back of his brain there struggled a crowd of lost images--ghosts of ideals which at this time yesterday had been the unquestioned rulers of his life--stretching out their tenuous arms to him, giving their last faint calls for help before taking their last backward plunge into oblivion, he only went on the faster so as to drown their voices in his own.
"Beatrice, why did you think of confiding in me? Why did you pick out this particular time? You never have before; you're not the sort of person that makes confidences. It wasn't because you were going away; that was no real reason at all.... Beatrice, don't you see? Don't you see the bond that lies between us two? Don't you see what's going to happen to us both?"