Page:Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark.djvu/369

 left in him. Thea put her hand to the back of her neck and pressed it, as if the muscles there were aching.

"Well," she said at last, "I at least overlook more in you than I do in myself. I am always excusing you to myself. I don't do much else."

"Then why, in Heaven's name, won't you let me be your friend? You make a scoundrel of me, borrowing money from another man to get out of my clutches."

"If I borrow from him, it 's to study. Anything I took from you would be different. As I said before, you 'd be keeping me."

"Keeping! I like your language. It 's pure Moonstone, Thea,—like your point of view. I wonder how long you 'll be a Methodist." He turned away bitterly.

"Well, I 've never said I was n't Moonstone, have I? I am, and that 's why I want Dr. Archie. I can't see anything so funny about Moonstone, you know." She pushed her chair back a little from the hearth and clasped her hands over her knee, still looking thoughtfully into the red coals. "We always come back to the same thing, Fred. The name, as you call it, makes a difference to me how I feel about myself. You would have acted very differently with a girl of your own kind, and that 's why I can't take anything from you now. You 've made everything impossible. Being married is one thing and not being married is the other thing, and that 's all there is to it. I can't see how you reasoned with yourself, if you took the trouble to reason. You say I was too much alone, and yet what you did was to cut me off more than I ever had been. Now I 'm going to try to make good to my friends out there. That 's all there is left for me."

"Make good to your friends!" Fred burst out. "What one of them cares as I care, or believes as I believe? I 've told you I 'll never ask a gracious word from you until I can ask it with all the churches in Christendom at my back."