"Ah, dearest—be kind.... Do.... Ah, do!" he had pleaded. But she had said, "No.... I shall be sensible—if that's being unkind.... I won't be rushed into elf-land by the hair of my head. I.... I won't be ... honeyfuggled...."
And they had laughed together.
Sophy finally got quite desperate with the fruitless struggle against him and against herself. She banished him ruthlessly for two weeks. He rebelled in vain. "I must have this time quite to myself," she told him. "I must think things out ... alone."
Loring found himself frantic thus exiled to the Macfarlanes, cut off from his heart's desire by six country miles as by the powers of darkness. He fled to Florida for a fortnight's tarpon-fishing. Then came her letters. He thought he should go mad over those letters. She played on him like the wind on water. Now he was all melting ripples under her delicate words—now some phrase sent his passion leaping mountain-high.... In the last letter she said: "Come back to me.... I miss you as the rose misses the honey from her heart ... as the stem misses the gathered flower.... I crave you as a sail might crave the wild wind that gives it life. Dear ... my dearest.... I know now why the 'wisdom of men is foolishness to God.'... God is Love ... my wisdom is foolishness to Love.... So I give you my foolish wisdom for a carpet under your feet. And my wise foolishness I give you for a seal upon your heart.... But myself I cannot give you, for I was yours when Love spread the foundations of the world...."
For she had found when Loring was far from her that "her heart was within him." She found the plain, wheaten bread of Philosophy dreary fare without the honey of romance. Poetry fled from her like a wild, shy bird, that would only come to one call. With his name she could lure it. She wrote page after page of love-verse as a sort of bridal offering for his return. She knew that there was madness in her mood, but it seemed a high and holy sort of frenzy—like the spiritual dementia that sends martyrs singing to the pyre. So she sung amid the flames that so exquisitely consumed her. For this was not a usual passion that she felt for Loring. She would have preferred that their love-life should be one long, ecstatic betrothal. She would have liked to give him the flower of love without its fruit. Yet his love was so different from all other loves that she had known ... it was so finely winged—so woven with adoration ... so fresh as with the dews of youth's first dawn; in her the answering love was so immaculate, veiled with imagination as for a first communion; all was so beautifully and perfectly harmonious between them, that she could not imagine discord ever following on this enchanted symphony.
And granted that their tastes were not always the same ... granted that she was older, that he seemed but a boy to her at times—must love mean oneness in all things? Was not oneness of heart and spirit enough? And was not woman immemorially older than man—the first created, but not the first conceived?—Did not the Christian faith give even God a mother, as if Divinity itself must needs be child of the eternal feminine?
And because the great, tender mother in her cherished Loring, the shy, wild lover in her only loved him more.
XI
They kept their secret from every one until May.