"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are you
sparing yourself?"
The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
picked it up.
"I am going to tell you the story," he said with a new quietness.
She was aroused by some change in him.
"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"
"You will have to listen," he said. "It is better for you to
know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
impossible for you to misjudge."
"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
do not understand you are judging yourself!"
He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
of the tree.
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