Now was the time to call to her aid all
her cynicism, all the shallow, heartless skepticism which had hitherto
ruled her character. Now was the time to laugh and to throw into this
man's face what she had been glad and satisfied to throw into the
faces of a dozen other men--the biting acid of her mockery. But she
could not laugh--she could not laugh at this man. Her tongue cleaved
to the roof of her mouth, her throat seemed thick with a suffocating
dust, so that she could make no sound.
"God forgive me if I have boasted of my own progress," he went on
earnestly. "I know too well how much of the long road I have still to
travel. It could not be otherwise. I can not reach in a few months
what men have attained who have always lived in the light of truth.
But I have hope. I carry in my heart your image and the ideal you have
set me--the ideal of your race."
Then speech was given her.
"Cast that ideal out!" she said wildly and recklessly. "It is too low
for you. You have passed it. You never needed it. Choose your own
ideal, and forget me--forget us all. We can teach you nothing." She
caught her breath as though she would have called back her own words.
They were not the words she had meant to speak. They did not sound
like her own. They had been put in her mouth by a force within her
whose existence had been revealed to her, as a hidden volcanic
mountain is revealed, by a sudden fierce upheaval, which threw off all
the old rubbish loading the surface of her nature.
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