“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.
He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and terror in the joy.
They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever. That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.
Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through the broken barriers of thought—jealousies and desires that showed him his partaking of the common life of humanity.
Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet, and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong, instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.
It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as dishonorable.
He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him. They would go back to Europe; live in Italy—the land of happy outcasts from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.
“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about anything but you; I never will—ambition, country, family. Nothing outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”
But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong. Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things, the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.
She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last, since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”