"I hope not. Oh, I hope I have never deceived myself--or you."
"I was grateful for your friendship," he said. "I can't be grateful for it now."
Agnes drew a long breath and murmured random words about the "time." Was it getting late?
"Yes," replied Rennes, "too late. Did I ever tell you why my father, with all his prospects, became a drawing-master? He told me that he had suffered so much learning why he could never paint, nor hope to paint, that he was determined to devote his knowledge to the service of apprentices. It seemed to him such an awful thing to mistake one's vocation. Now I feel that one of us--perhaps both of us, you and I, are doing even a worse thing. We are deliberately throwing happiness to the dogs."
"I don't think so," said Agnes, in a trembling voice. "There is duty, you know; that is something higher than happiness, I believe."
"I envy you. I don't even know what you mean by duty. It seems to me another name for the tyranny of false sentiment."
"Don't disturb my ideas," she exclaimed, with an appealing gesture. "Don't say these things. They make me wretched. I can't afford to doubt and question. One must have a few permanent rules of conduct."
"But if they are fantastic, capricious, insincere?"
"I can't argue. I am not clever. I will not change my views. I dare not. It would make me hate you."
"That may be. That is safer, after all, than being the slave of some other will stronger than my own. Why do you try to disturb my life--now--after so many really happy months of friendship?"
"Were they so happy? Agnes, were they happy?"
"Yes," she said, at last; "relatively, yes."
"It is quite true. Good women drive us to the bad ones."
"Oh! what can you mean? Surely we are saying too much. We shall reproach ourselves later. I live, again and again, through one conversation. The phrases come into my mind with every possible shade of significance."
She pushed back her hat, and pressed her hand to her brow, which was contracting nervously as she spoke.
"I don't wish to be altered by any change in principle," she continued, "nor distracted, from my plain obligations, into other interests. I daresay I sound quite heartless and odd. I daresay you won't like me any more." Her voice faltered, but her lips remained precise. "But one must know one's mind--one _must_. You don't know yours; that is the whole trouble, David."