“Does it contradict yours?”
“You know it does; or why should things be more difficult—terrible you call them—for you this morning? You say she is more definite than I am. I think definiteness in such matters pure illusion, and I only ask you to realize that it’s easy to a simple nature like Miss Latimer’s. She is unaware of the complexity of the problem.”
“You think that Malcolm, too, was so simple?”
“I do. Not so simple as Miss Latimer; but simpler than you, and you know it; and far simpler than I am; and you know that, too, my dear.”
She sought no dispute. Almost with a hard patience she went on. “Wasn’t their definiteness intuition rather than illusion? Isn’t intuition easier for the simple than for the complex?”
“Intuition isn’t definiteness; that’s just what it isn’t. As for it’s being easier; everything is easier, of course, to simple people.” She, like himself, and she had admitted it, was complex; yet his terrible disadvantage with her was that, while too clever to be satisfied by anything she did not understand, she was too ignorant, really, to understand the cogency of what he might have found to say. Miss Latimer’s simplicities would have more weight with her.
“Something must be definite,” she said. “Immortality means nothing unless it can in some way be defined. It must mean a person, and a person means memory, feeling, will. So, if Malcolm is immortal, he exists now, as he existed here; unchanged; loving me, as he told Cicely he should always love me; and waiting for me, as he told her he would wait.” She had come back to it and Miss Latimer had fixed her in it.
“Perhaps he’s fallen in love with some one else,” Bevis suggested. “You’ve changed to that extent, after all. And you are not longing for him. Quite the contrary.”
Somehow he could not control these exhibitions of his exasperation, nor could he unsay them, ashamed of them as he immediately was.
Her dark gaze rested on him at last, unresentful still, but with, at last, an almost recognized hostility. He was ashamed, yet more exasperated than ever as he saw it.