It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the perfect comprehension that their thoughts were shared, as if they had known and loved for years.
He caught her hand. “My conspirator! My secret-sharer!”
She gave him her heart in her eyes.
He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”
She disengaged her hand.
He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his arms. “You must tell me, my Rosalie. Tell me.”
She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that I loved you.”
When she was home and got to her room she undressed, suffering her clothes to lie as they slipped from her. She got into bed, moving there and then lying there as one in trance.
Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined—all, all gone; all nothing, surrendered all. At a touch, in a moment, without a cry, without a shot, without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept away. All she had been, all she’d designed, all she had built within herself and walled about herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip spurned away,—all, all betrayed, breached, mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered, burst away.
She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry—most frightfully.