If after the help one has
had from you one can't either take care of one's self or simply
hold one's tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of
interest. It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried
still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent," she asked,
"to how I appear to you?" And as he found himself unable
immediately to say: "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all?
Is it impossible you should stay on--so that one mayn't lose you?"
"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?"
"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you--well," she beautifully brought out,
"when we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've
wanted to see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these
last weeks. How shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your
being gone forever?" Then as if the straightness of this appeal,
taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: "Where IS
your 'home' moreover now--what has become of it? I've made a
change in your life, I know I have; I've upset everything in your
mind as well; in your sense of--what shall I call it?--all the
decencies and possibilities.
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