Loring was silent. His heart gave a hot twist. This was just what he most feared, that she would "fly far and wide" away from him. He had never in all his exceedingly wilful life desired anything with the frantic vehemence that he desired Sophy. And he was not accustomed to having his desires denied him. At home the household word was: "Morry has such a strong will." This had been the slogan of his childhood: "My will—or nothing. My will—or a burst blood-vessel. Death or punishment in any form—rather than yield my will." He had been rather delicate as a child. So his parents had preferred concession to the convulsions with which he threatened them whenever he was crossed in any way. It was a wonder that he grew up to likable manhood. Yet people thought him "perfectly charming"—a bit spoiled, but delightful. Girls called him "fascinating." His own pals said: "Morry Loring's a good sort. A bit ugly if you cross him—you've got to know how to handle him; but he's all right." By "handling" Loring they meant that one must seem to give him his way while skilfully getting one's own. This was not always practicable. Then coolnesses sprang up. Only two out of the old Harvard set stuck to him. But he was, in fact, not at all a bad sort—provided that you were willing not to announce too positively and publicly that your soul was your own. And his will was certainly strong. It was a brand-new sensation for him to will so ardently the possession of a thing which he was in sick doubt of securing. It had a poignant yet terrible charm of sheer novelty. And at the same time he experienced an inner revelation which shook him even more. It was the undreamed of capacity for adoration. There was no denying it—his spirit was on its knees to Sophy. She seemed to him as beautifully overwhelming as the suddenly revealed goddess to the shepherd of Mount Ida. There was about her, in addition to the aura of beauty and talent, the glamour of a woman who has moved brilliantly in a brilliant world. Had he been told that this naïf snobbishness had much to do with his novel emotion of adoration, he would have received the information with a tempest of incredulous and outraged wrath. Yet, though undoubtedly due to it in part, there was also genuine humility in his love for Sophy—that romantic abasement of self which makes a man find a subtle pleasure in the realisation of his own unworthiness.
Loring had come down to Aleck Macfarlane's country place to buy hunters. When he saw Sophy, he believed suddenly in Fate. No mere chance wish to buy hunters had sent him to Virginia. Here was the Lady of Legend—the Princess out of the fairy-tale books of his boyhood. He had always heard of Virginia as romantic. Now he found that it was inhabited by Romance herself in the person of Sophy Chesney. He had heard often of the Hon. Mrs. Cecil Chesney. He knew that she "had written something." Poems were not much "in his line." Yet he sent to Brentano's for Sophy's poems the day after he met her. He was frankly disappointed in them. He had expected something more fiery. And he tried to get a volume of her first book, The Shadow of a Flame. But it was out of print. He had given Brentano an order to find it for him. Only that morning the book had arrived from England. He was still tingling with the fearless, young passion of her printed words, as he walked now beside her. Her own words seemed to put him from her—far back with that past self which she no longer was, and which he craved to have her be again. And how young she looked ... what a girl! It was absurd, vexatious, incredible, impossible that so keen a flame should have died down into the white ash of philosophy ... as expressed in her latest poems.
"A penny...." said Sophy.
His long silence disturbed her. He gazed down at her, his bold eyes softening.
"I was thinking that you looked about nineteen, with that black bow on your hair," he said.
"And you say that as if you were about ten," she retorted, laughing.
"I don't feel ten."
"And I don't feel nineteen."
"Yet you're really not quite old enough to be so devilish motherly with me." His tone was quite pettish.
She was teasing him on purpose. She had found out at once that he was badly spoilt. It pleased her to see him wince, and flush, helpless under her amiable elderliness. She liked him very much, but she didn't want any love-making, though she didn't mind his being so evidently in love with her. She thought that a "disappointment in love" might do him no end of good—teach him that he couldn't "swing the earth a trinket at his wrist"—avenge some of the many young women with whom she felt sure that he had flirted outrageously. One wasn't given a Greek head, many millions, and an exaggerated sense of one's Ego, in order that one might practise the homelier virtues, such as unselfishness.