“So you see,” he said, in his lighter voice, “thorns and precipices and terrors dissolve like dreams.” She had seen everything and he was ushering her out. But his eyes now met hers, looking across the little space at him.
“And I? Do I, too, dissolve like a dream?” she said.
His smile now was lighter than his voice had been. “Absolutely. Though I own that you are a highly colored phantom. Your color is very vivid indeed. Sometimes it almost masters my thought.”
He had not, in his mere wish for ease, quite known what he meant to say, and now her look did not show him any deepened consciousness; but, suddenly, he felt that under his lightness and her quiet the current ran deeply.
“I master your thought?” she repeated. “Doesn’t that make you distrust thought sometimes?”
“No,” he laughed. “It makes me distrust you, dear Eppie.”
There were all sorts of things before them now. What they were he really didn’t know; perhaps she didn’t, either. At all events he kept his eyes off them, and shaking his crossed foot a little, he still looked at her, smiling.
“Why?” she asked.
He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t imply more than he could face.
“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it would need my own will, blind again, for that.”