e a better use of them?
Money stands for all kinds of things--its purchasing quality isn't
limited to diamonds and motor-cars."

"Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a
hospital."

"But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my
ambitions are good enough for me."

Selden met this appeal with a laugh. "Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not
divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying
to get!"

"Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I
probably shan't like them?" She drew a deep breath. "What a miserable
future you foresee for me!"

"Well--have you never foreseen it for yourself?" The slow colour rose to
her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of
feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.

"Often and often," she said. "But it looks so much darker when you show
it to me!"

He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent,
while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air.

But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. "Why do you do
this to me?" she cried. "Why do you make the things I have chosen seem
hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?"

The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen. He
himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was
the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon's
solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither
seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to
the other across unsounded depths of feeling.

"No, I have nothing to give you instead," he said, sitting up and turning
so that he faced her. "If I had, it should be yours, you know."

She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than the
manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he saw that
for a moment she wept.

It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and drew
down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she turned on
him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he said to
himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art.

The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony:
"Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't
offer you?"

Her face brightened at thi