“I had to come,” he said, the light of heaven shining on me out of his eyes. “I was so desolate without you. I tried to say something to you before I left for my vacation, but the words wouldn’t come. Since I have been away I have written you many letters, but I did not mail them, for they were like my old self from which I want to break away.”
He put his cool, strong hand into mine. “You can save me,” he said. “You can free me from the bondage of age-long repressions. You can lift me out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality. Without you I am the dry dust of hopes unrealized. You are fire and sunshine and desire. You make life changeable and beautiful and full of daily wonder.”
I couldn’t speak. I was so on fire with his words. Then, like whirlwinds in my brain, rushed out the burning words of the matchmaker: “Not young, not lively, and without money, too!”
“You are younger than youth,” he said, kissing my hands. “Every day of your unlived youth shall be relived with love, but such a love as youth could never know.”
And then how it happened I don’t know; but his arms were around me. “Sara Reisel, tell me, do you love me,” he said, kissing me on my hair and on my eyes and on my lips.
I could only weep and tremble with joy at his touch. “The miracle!” cried my heart; “the miracle of America come true!”
WHERE LOVERS DREAM
For years I was saying to myself—Just so you will act when you meet him. Just so you will stand. So will you look on him. These words you will say to him.
I wanted to show him that what he had done to me could not down me; that his leaving me the way he left me, that his breaking my heart the way he broke it, didn’t crush me; that his grand life and my pinched-in life, his having learning and my not having learning—that the difference didn’t count so much like it seemed; that on the bottom I was the same like him.
But he came upon me so sudden, all my plannings for years smashed to the wall. The sight of him was like an earthquake shaking me to pieces.