“You are wrong,” said the Philosopher. “An old person can take your hand like this and say, ‘May every good thing come to you, my daughter.’ For all trouble there is sympathy, and for love there is memory, and these are the head and the heart talking to each other in quiet friendship. What the heart knows today the head will understand tomorrow, and as the head must be the scholar of the heart it is necessary that our hearts be purified and free from every false thing, else we are tainted beyond personal redemption.”
“Sir,” said the girl, “I know of two great follies—they are love and speech, for when these are given they can never be taken back again, and the person to whom these are given is not any richer, but the giver is made poor and abashed. I gave my love to a man who did not want it. I told him of my love, and he lifted his eyelids at me; that is my trouble.”
For a moment the Philosopher sat in stricken silence looking on the ground. He had a strange disinclination to look at the girl although he felt her eyes fixed steadily on him. But in a little while he did look at her and spoke again.
“To carry gifts to an ungrateful person cannot be justified and need not be mourned for. If your love is noble why do you treat it meanly? If it is lewd the man was right to reject it.”
“We love as the wind blows,” she replied.
“There is a thing,” said the Philosopher, “and it is both the biggest and the littlest thing in the world.”
“What is that?” said the girl.
“It is pride,” he answered. “It lives in an empty house. The head which has never been visited by the heart is the house pride lives in. You are in error, my dear, and not in love. Drive out the knave pride, put a flower in your hair and walk freely again.”
The girl laughed, and suddenly her pale face became rosy as the dawn and as radiant and lovely as a cloud. She shed warmth and beauty about her as she leaned forward.
“You are wrong,” she whispered, “because he does love me; but he does not know it yet. He is young and full of fury, and has no time to look at women, but he looked at me. My heart knows it and my head knows it, but I am impatient and yearn for him to look at me again. His heart will remember me tomorrow, and he will come searching for me with prayers and tears, with shouts and threats. I will be very hard to find tomorrow when he holds out his arms to the air and the sky, and is astonished and frightened to find me nowhere. I will hide from him tomorrow, and frown at him when he speaks, and turn aside when he follows me: until the day after tomorrow when he will frighten me with his anger, and hold me with his furious hands, and make me look at him.”
Saying this the girl arose and prepared to go away.
“He is in that house,” said she, “and I would not let him see me here for anything in the world.”
“You have wasted all my time,” said the Philosopher, smiling.
“What else is time for?” said the girl, and she kissed the Philosopher and ran swiftly down the road.
She had been gone but a few moments when a man came out of the grey house and walked quickly across the grass. When he reached the hedge separating the field from the road he tossed his two arms in the air, swung them down, and jumped over the hedge into the roadway. He was a short, dark youth, and so swift and sudden were his movements that he seemed to look on every side at the one moment although he bore furiously to his own direction.
The Philosopher addressed him mildly.
“That was a good jump,” said he.
The young man spun around from where he stood, and was by the Philosopher’s side in an instant.
“It would be a good jump for other men,” said he, “but it is only a little jump for me. You are very dusty, sir; you must have travelled a long distance today.”
“A long distance,” replied the Philosopher. “Sit down here, my friend, and keep me company for a little time.”
“I do not like sitting down,” said the young man, “but I always consent to a request, and I always accept friendship.” And, so saying, he threw himself down on the grass.
“Do you work in that big house?” said the Philosopher.
“I do,” he replied. “I train the hounds for a fat, jovial man, full of laughter and insolence.”
“I think you do not like your master.”
“Believe, sir, that I do not like any master; but this man I hate. I have been a week in his service, and he has not once looked on me as on a friend. This very day, in the kennel, he passed me as though I were a tree or a stone. I almost leaped to catch him by the throat and say: ‘Dog, do you not salute your fellow man?’ But I looked after him and let him go, for it would be an unpleasant thing to strangle a fat person.”
“If you are displeased with your master should you not look for another occupation?” said the Philosopher.
“I was thinking of that, and I was thinking whether I ought to kill him or marry his daughter. She would have passed me by as her father did,
