She shook her head mournfully.
“Isn’t it enough that I’m near you and can help you, and that we can both still go and come as we want to?”
“No, I get only the little fragments of your life, and I want all of it. If you can’t do it willingly, of course, it’s as silly for me to demand it as to try to nail that sunbeam down to the floor there! But tell me, has there ever been another?”
“No, never, Jim!” she cried. “There was never any one who could make me so happy—and so miserable,—who could make me so unsatisfied with myself and with my life!”
He studied her upturned face. In it he imagined he could see all the old opposition of the dual and strangely contending nature. About the shadowy eyes seemed to lurk the weariness and the rebelliousness of the inwardly pure woman who had been driven to face life in its more dubious phases, the woman who had broken laws and essayed great hazards with him. Yet about the fresh young mouth remained all the pride and virginal purity of the woman whose inward life was till virginal and pure. In this, he felt, lay the bitterest thing of all. She was still a good woman, but the memory of how, through the dark and devious ways of the career that seemed to have engulfed her, she had fought and struggled for that almost incongruous purity of mind and body, remained to him a tragic and autumnal emblem of what her unknown earlier, April-like goodness of girlish soul must have been. He sighed as he thought of it, before he began to speak again, for it gave him the haunting impression that he had been cheated out of something; that the beauty and rapture of that Aprilian girlhood should have been his, and yet had eluded him.
“Even though there had been another,” he went on quietly, “I don’t believe it would count. Isn’t it strange how we all beat and flutter and break our wings around a beautiful face! One face, just a little softer, one woman’s eyes, just a little deeper, and one voice, a little mellower; and dear me, dear me—how this wayward mortal passion of ours throbs and beats and surges about it! One beautiful face, and it sends world-history all awry, and brings out armies and changes maps, and makes men happy or miserable, as it likes!”
“That’s the first time I ever knew you were a poet!” she cried in almost a coo of pride.
His hand lay heavily on her crown of tumbled gold hair. “Won’t you marry me?” he asked again, as quietly as before.
“Oh, Jim,” she cried, “I’m afraid of it! I’m afraid of myself, and of you!”
“But see what we’ve been through together—the heights and the depths. And we never hated each other, there!”