gnificance----
Oh, no, my friend. Oh, no! Let those women who have it in their power
to repeople the earth which has lost so many millions of its sons,
cherish that delusion of the supreme importance of love; but not I! I
have had my dream, but it is over. If we had met in Vienna it would
never have claimed me at all. In New York one may be serious in the
romantic manner when one is temporarily free from care, but seriousness
is of another and a portentous quality over there."

"Why did you ask me to wait six months and then join you in Vienna?"

She turned her eyes on him with what he had once called her look of
ancient wisdom. There was not an expiring flicker of youth in them,
nor in the faint smile on her lips. He had thrown himself back in his
corner and folded his arms; he had no desire to attract the attention
of the passers-by. But his face was as white as a dark man's can be
and his eyes were both stricken and bitter.

"To give you time to get over it," she said. "To write another play.
To settle down into your old life--and look back upon this episode as
upon a dream, a wonderful dream, but difficult to recall as anything
more substantial."

"So I inferred. And you have not the courage to marry me--here--today?"

"No, that is the one thing for which I have no courage whatever. In
three months I should hate you and myself. I should not have even one
memory in my life that I had no wish to banish--the sustaining memory
of love undestroyed I may take back with me now. Courage! I could
contemplate going back to certain death at the hands of an assassin, or
in another revolution; to stand on the edge of the abyss, the last
human being alive in Europe, and look down upon her expiring throes
before I went over the brink myself. But I have not the courage to
marry you."

Clavering picked up the tube and told the driver to stop.

He closed the door and lifted his hat.

"Good-bye, Madame Zattiany," he said. And as the driver was listening,
he added: "A pleasant journey."

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