"You are too far-reaching," she affirmed. "You want to gather
everything into your life. You cannot. You will only be unhappy
if you try. No man can do it. You must learn your limitations
or suffer all your days."
"Limitations!" He repeated the words with measureless scorn. "If
I learn them at all," he declared, with unexpected force, "it
will be with scars and bruises, for nothing else will content
me."
"We are, I should say, almost the same age," she remarked slowly.
"I am twenty-five," he told her.
"I am twenty-two," she said. "It seems strange that two people
whose ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have
come together like this even for a moment. I do not understand
it at all. Did you expect that I should tell you just what I saw
in the clouds that night?"
"No," he answered, "not exactly. I have spoken of my first
interest in you only. There are other things. I told a lie
about the bracelet and I followed you out of the boarding-house
and I brought you here, for some other for quite a different
reason."
"Tell me what it was," she demanded.
"I do not know it myself," he declared solemnly. "I really and
honestly do not know it. It is because I hoped that it might
come to me while we were together, that I am here with you at
this moment. I do not like impulses which I do not understand."
She laughed at him a little scornfully.
"After all," she said, "although it may not have dawned upon you
yet, it is probably the same wretched reason.
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