elf. They were my mother--and you."

She laughed in quiet raillery. "Two have cared for you, but you have
cared for only one. And what devotion you have given him!"

"I have cared for my mother--for my children--"

"Yes--your children. I forgot them."

"And--for you."

She made what I thought a movement of impatience.

"For you," I repeated. Then: "Elizabeth, you were right when you wrote
that I was a coward."

She rose and stood--near enough to me for me to catch her faint, elusive
perfume--and gazed out into the distance.

"In St. Louis the other day," I went on, "I saw a man who has risen to
power greater than I can ever hope to have. And he got it by marching
erect in the open."

"Yet you have everything you used to want," she said dreamily.

"Yes--everything. Only to learn how worthless what I wanted was. And for
this trash, this dirt, I have given--all I had that was of value."

"All?"

"All," I replied. "Your love and my own self-respect."

"Why do you think you've not been brave?" she asked after a while.

"Because I've won by playing on the weaknesses and fears of men which my
own weaknesses and fears enabled me to understand."

"You have done wrong--deliberately?"

"Deliberately."

"But that good might come?"

"So I told myself."

"And good has come? I have heard that figs do grow on thistles."

"Good has come. But, I think, in spite of me, not through me."

"But now that you see," she said, turning her eyes to mine with appeal
in them, and something more, I thought, "you will--you will not go on?"

"I don't know. Is there such a thing as remorse without regret?" And
then my self-control went and I let her see what I had commanded myself
to keep hid: "I only know clearly one thing, Elizabeth--only one thing
matters. _You_ are the whole world to me. You and I could--what could we
not do together!"

Her color slowly rose, slowly vanished. "Was _that_ what you came to
tell me?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered, not flinching.

"_That_ is the climax of your moralizings?"

"Yes," I answered. "And of my cowardice."

A little icy smile just changed the curve of her lips. "When I was a
girl, you won my love--or took it when I gave it to you, if you prefer.
And then--you threw it away. For an ambition you weren't brave enough to
pursue honorably, you broke my heart."

"Yes," I answered. "But--I loved you."

"And now," she went on, "after your years of self-indulgence, of
getting what