She was almost alarmed, certainly shocked.
“But you don’t believe such things,” she almost shivered, “I’m sure you don’t, it isn’t right, it is not true.”
“It may not be true,” he declared implacably, “but I believe it. The real warrant for holding a belief is not that it is true but that it satisfies you.” She did not seem to understand that; she only answered irrelevantly. “I’ll make it all up to you some day. I shall not change, David, toward you. We have got all our lives before us. I shan’t alter—will you?”
“Not alter!” he began angrily but then subduedly added with a grim irony that she did not gather in: “No, I shall not alter.”
She flung herself upon his breast murmuring: “I’ll make it all up to you, some day.”
He felt like a sick-minded man and was glad when they parted. He went back to his cottage grumbling audibly to himself. Why could he not take this woman with the loving and constant heart and wed her? He did not know why, but he knew he never would do that. She was fine to look upon but she had ideas (if you could call them ideas) which he disliked. Her instincts and propensities were all wrong, they were antagonistic to him, just, as he felt, his were antagonistic to her. What was true, though, was her sorrow at what she called their misunderstandings and what was profound, what was almost convincing, was her assumption (which but measured her own love for him) that he could not cease to love her. How vain that was. He had not loved any woman in the form she thought all love must take. These were not misunderstandings, they were just simply at opposite ends of a tilted beam; he the sophisticated, and she the innocent beyond the reach of his sophistries. But Good Lord, what did it all matter? what did anything matter? He would not see her again. He undressed, got into bed. He thought of Julia, of Ianthe, of Kate. He had a dream in which he lay in a shroud upon a white board and was interrogated by a saint who carried a reporter’s notebook and a fountain pen.
“What is your desire, sick-minded man?” the saint interrogated him, “what consummation would exalt your languid eyes?”
“I want the present not to be. It is neither grave nor noble.”
“Then that is your sickness. That mere negation is at once your hope and end.”
“I do not know.”