‘Perhaps I might say never. I have spooned or flirted or whatever the name of it might be, but I was never seriously attached to one girl, and unable to think of anything but her. But what has your question to do with this?’
‘Everything. If you really loved a girl—that is, if she filled every corner of your heart, if she was first in every plan and project of your life, not alone her wishes and her likings, but her very words and the sound of her voice—if you saw her in everything that was beautiful, and heard her in every tone that delighted you—if to be moving in the air she breathed was ecstasy, and that heaven itself without her was cheerless—if—’
‘Oh, don’t go on, Nina. None of these ecstasies could ever be mine. I have no nature to be moved or moulded in this fashion. I might be very fond of a girl, but she’d never drive me mad if she left me for another.’
‘I hope she may, then, if it be with such false money you would buy her,’ said she fiercely. ‘Do you know,’ added she, after a pause, ‘I was almost on the verge of saying, go and break the stones; the métier is not much beneath you, after all!’
‘This is scarcely civil, mademoiselle; see what my candour has brought upon me!’
‘Be as candid as you like upon the faults of your nature. Tell every wickedness that you have done or dreamed of, but don’t own to cold-heartedness. For that there is no sympathy!’
‘Let us go back a bit, then,’ said he, ‘and let us suppose that I did love in the same fervent and insane manner you spoke of, what and how would it help me here?’
‘Of course it would. Of all the ingenuity that plotters talk of, of all the imagination that poets dream, there is nothing to compare with love. To gain a plodding subsistence a man will do much. To win the girl he loves, to make her his own, he will do everything: he will strive, and strain, and even starve to win her. Poverty will have nothing mean if confronted for her, hardship have no suffering if endured for her sake. With her before him, all the world shows but one goal; without her, life is a mere dreary task, and himself a hired labourer.’
‘I confess, after all this, that I don’t see how breaking stones would be more palatable to me because some pretty girl that I was fond of saw me hammering away at my limestone!’
‘If you could have loved as I would wish you to love, your career had never fallen to this. The heart that loved would have stimulated the head that thought. Don’t fancy that people are only better because they are in love, but they are greater, bolder, brighter, more daring in danger, and more ready in every emergency. So wonder-working is the real passion that even in the base mockery of Love men have risen to genius. Look what it made Petrarch, and I might say Byron too, though he never loved worthy of the name.’