"My life ... what is past.... My life is over ... that part of life...."
"Your life?... Over?..." He gazed at her so that her eyes wavered from his. She could not help this. It distressed her to be standing there before him in her short skirt, bare-headed, with eyes that would not keep steady. She felt that he had the advantage of her out there in those wide, still aisles of gold with their groining of dark branches. It was as if he had her far from home, in his own haunts. The glowing forest sustained him, gave him his natural setting. He stood there facing her, the young wood-god in his own domain. She felt a droll almost hysteric yearning for trailing skirts, and the dignified refuge of an armchair. That absurdly girlish bow of black ribbon seemed to burn her neck. She knew that she looked incongruously young for the soul that inhabited her. She made a desperate grasp at dignity of voice. Her cold tone should be her trailing garment—make him realise the distance that was spiritually between them. When she spoke it was in a steady voice.
"My life—as regards love—is over, because I have come to a place in it where I do not even wish love," she said icily. A banal quotation slipped from her before she could stop it. "'Ich habe geliebt und geleben,'" she said, vexed at the crass ordinariness of the words as they struck her ear.
There was silence. A squirrel dropped a nut through the still, flaky gold of lapping leaves—then chittered angrily at its own awkwardness.
Loring said at last in a strangled voice:
"I am jealous of that dead man."
Sophy whitened.
"Don't say such things to me," burst from her in a sharp whisper.
"Have I hurt you?" he whispered back. "I'd die for you ... have I hurt you? Did you love him so much as that? Are you really dead ... with him?"
"Yes."