Look here! I haven’t got much money—but in America you can make it if you want to! I’m going back there. You come too—I’ll take you when I go!”
She had not tried to free herself; she just stood there passive, unresisting, as he poured that frenzied proposal in her ears. Now, with the same passive and unyielding movement, the bright armour of her young eyes, she stepped away, and stood looking at him silently for a moment. Then slowly, with an almost imperceptible movement, she shook her head. “Oh, you’ll forget all about us,” she said quietly. “You’ll forget about our lives here—buried in fog—and rain—and failure—and defeat.”
“Failure and defeat won’t last for ever.”
“Sometimes they do,” she said with a quiet finality that froze his heart.
“Not for you—they won’t!” Eugene said, and took her by the hand again with desperate entreaty. “Listen to me—” he blundered on incoherently, with the old feeling of nameless shame and horror. “You don’t need to tell me what it is—I don’t want to know—but whatever it is—for you, it doesn’t matter—you can get the best of it.”
She said nothing, but just looked at him through that hard bright armour of her eyes, the obdurate finality of her smile.
“Good-bye,” she said, “I’ll not forget you either.” She looked at him for a moment curiously before she spoke again. “I wonder,” she said slowly, “if you’ll ever understand just what it was you did for me by coming here?”
“What was it?”
“You opened a door that I thought had been closed for ever,” she said, “a door that let me look in on a world I thought I should never see again—a new bright world, a new life and a new beginning—for us all. And I thought that was something which would never happen to anyone in this house again.”
“It will to you,” Eugene said, and took her hand again with desperate eagerness. “It can happen to you whenever you want it to. It’s yours, I’ll swear it to you, if you’ll only speak.”
She looked at him, with an almost imperceptible movement of her head.
“I tell you I know what I’m talking about.”
Again she shook her head.
“You don’t know,” she said. “You’re young. You’re an American. There are some things you’ll never be old enough to know.—For some of
