"Are you--are you--_sure?_"
She reflected a minute. "I know what makes you ask that. You think I've
changed too suddenly. If so, I can explain it."
The silence in which he waited for her to continue assented in some sort
to this reading of his thoughts.
"It isn't that I've changed," she said, at last, speaking thoughtfully,
"so much as that I've wakened to a sense of what's real for me as
distinguished from what's been forced and artificial. You may understand
me better if I say that in leading my life up to--up to recently, I've
been like a person at a play--a play in which the situations are
interesting and the characters sympathetic, but which becomes like a
dream the minute you leave the theater and go home. I feel that--that
with you--I've--I've got home."
He would have said something, but she hurried on.
"I've not changed toward the play, except to recognize the fact that it
_was_ a play--for me. I knew it the instant I began to learn about
papa's troubles. That was like a summons to me, like a call. When it
came, everything else--the things I'd been taught to strive for and the
people whom I had supposed to be the only ones worth living with, grew
distant and shadowy, as though they belonged to a picture or a book.
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