The voice, as well as the feeling that lay behind, hardly disturbed the images and rhythms in their wondrous flow. Rather, they seemed a part of them. "N. H." turned. He saw Dr. Fillery distinctly, sitting motionless among the shadows by the wall.
"It is, for you, a new relationship, and seems small, cramping and unnecessary——"
"What is it?" "N. H." asked. "What is this love she seeks to hold me with, saying that I need it? Dear Fillery," he added, moving nearer, "will you tell me what it is? I found it sweet and pleasant, yet I fear it."
"It is," was the reply, "in its best form, the highest quality we know——"
"Ah! I felt the fire in it," interrupted "N. H." smiling. "I smelt the flowers." His smile seemed faintly luminous across the gloom.
"Because it was the best," replied the other gently. "In its best form it means, sometimes, the complete sacrifice of one being for the welfare of another. There is no self in it at all." He felt the eyes of his companion fixed upon him in the darkness of the quiet room; he felt likewise that he was bewildered and perplexed. "As, for instance, the mother for her child," he went on. "That is the purest form of it we know."
"One being feels it for one other only," "N. H." repeated apparently ignoring the reference to maternal love. "Each wants the other for himself alone! Each lives for the other only, the rest excluded! It is always two and two. Is that what she means?"
"She would not like it if you had the same feeling for another—woman," Fillery explained. "She would feel jealousy—which means she would grudge sharing you with another. She would resent it, afraid of losing you."
"Two and two, and two and two," the words floated through the shadows. The ideal seemed to shock and hurt him; he could not understand it. "She asks for the whole of me—all to herself. It is lower than insects, flowers even. It is against Nature. So small, so separate——"
"But Nature," interrupted Dr. Fillery, after an interval of silence between them, "is not concerned with what we call love. She is indifferent to it. Her purpose is merely the continuance of the Race, and she accomplishes this by making men and women attractive to one another. This, too," he explained, "we call love, though it is love in its weakest, least enduring form."