“That you are dogged and persistent; and that therefore you stick to your ideals better than he.”
“Do you know how comparatively easy that is, even for a plodder, when his ideals are set up before him in visible form, so that he can not forget them by day or by night? I wonder if you can realize what it means to have a face like yours looking up from every dirty strip of galley-proof, and a voice like yours sounding under the rumble of the big presses. It’s something of a possession for an every-day man.” A soft glow that might have been a trick of the spring sun spread over Madeline’s face. There is no thought more intoxicating to a girl than to feel that she stands to a man for his ideals. A long sweet silence fell between them, while she mused on this thing, and he watched her in tense anxiety.
“Madeline!” he cried, suddenly leaning forward and catching her hands. “I must tell you! You must know, and I must know!”
With the grasp of his fingers, the first physical touch of love, an electric pang seemed to leap through the girl’s body; and in the flash were shown to her new heights and depths in herself, and a thousand dim things in the future. She felt, in the man, the revelation of that mystery by which the body’s passion slips into passion of the soul—that soul-love, which by its very nature can never know lassitude nor revulsion. And what was actual in him, grew radiant with possibility in herself.
She looked up to meet his eager face and his eyes like lamps. “No, no!” she cried. “Don’t tell me.”
“But do you know without telling?”
“I must think.”
“But surely you must have read it long ago.”
“I only glanced at it. I never looked it in the face.”
“Don’t examine it too closely now, or I’m afraid you will find it a poor thing,” he said whimsically. “Take it on impulse, Madeline.”