Wouldn't you
miss your friends?"
"_All_ our friends? And who will be on the other side?"
"Almost no one that we know--that you would care to call upon or go about
with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of wealth or
social position. Those other people who are in town when it is said 'Nobody
is in town now!'"
She did not answer.
"Where would you be?" he repeated.
"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that." She came around and sat on his knee.
"Where? Why, there's only one 'where' in all this world for
me--'wheresoever thou goest.'"
And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with her
was smothered by her.
Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how fearless
he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him, how blessed she
was in the love of such a man. And he--he was regretting that his "pose"
had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not been so bitter in
his attacks upon his and his wife's friends, the coal conspirators. When he
had definitely cast in his lot with "the shearers" why persist in making
his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more loudly than ever in behalf
of "the sheep?" Above all, why had he let his habit of voluble denunciation
lead him into this hypocrisy with the woman he loved?
He admitted to himself that "causes" had ceased to interest him except as
they might contribute to the advancement of his power.
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