“I would never allow it to happen to me.”
“It would not be to look up at the sky—it would not even be to stoop to a flower?”
“I would not allow myself to look, or to stoop, knowing that after I had looked and gathered, the flower would wither, the sky be black.”
He saw, as she gazed steadily round at him, that the gaze was through tears. Clasping his hands with a supplication that was, indeed, more the worshiper’s than the lover’s, Eustace said:
“But would you—would you stoop?”
“I cannot answer that; I cannot think the answer. Your friendship has led me away from the rocky wastes into the sweetest, the serenest meadows.” Though she spoke with complete self-mastery, the tears ran down as she said these words, and she turned her face away. “I should be culpable indeed if I allowed you to lead me aside into a fool’s paradise, with a precipice waiting for you in the middle of it. I shall be an old woman while you are still a young man.”
“Beloved woman, can you not believe that, young or old, you are the same to me? I have not fallen in love with you—I have found you. When I saw your face in the old picture I knew that it was mine.”
“The face of a girl. I was nineteen then.”
“Do not juggle with the truth. Your face now is dearer to me than the girl’s face. Your heart, I believe, is nearer mine than you know. That struggle in you when you imagined that I loved Claire, was it not, in part, the struggle of a sacrifice? Did you not submit because you thought that the side of self-sacrifice must be the right side?”
Still her face was turned from him, and after a silence she said, “Perhaps.”