On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he
had never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at
the end, she would let him come into her sitting-room for five
minutes. He felt on this point a passion of suspense and impatience,
and yet for what would it be but to tell her how poor he was? This
was literally the moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the
hour of Bohemia left him. Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in
the course of the day his whole temper on the subject of certain
fitnesses had changed. At Jersey Villas (it was near midnight, and
Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her glimmering taper, had said:
"Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you like!"), in her precarious
parlour, which was indeed, after the brilliances of the evening, a
return to ugliness and truth, she let him stand while he explained
that he had certainly everything in the way of fame and fortune still
to gain, but that youth and love and faith and energy--to say nothing
of her supreme dearness--were all on his side. Why, if one's
beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the
conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him
out, would make just the blessed difference? Whether Mrs. Ryves
heard him out or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle
happens to be silent; but after he had got possession of both her
hands and breathed into her face for a moment all the intensity of
his tenderness--in the relief and joy of utterance he felt it carry
him like a rising flood--she checked him with better reasons, with a
cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt there was something deep.
Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier than ever, yet it had
never meant so many fears and pains--impossibilities and memories,
independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache for the
ruin of a friendship that had been happy. She had liked him--if she
hadn't she wouldn't have let him think so!--but she protested that