“No,” she said, “love includes everything.”
“Sentimental cant,” he replied. “You want the state of chaos, that’s all. It is ultimate nihilism, this freedom-in-love business, this freedom which is love and love which is freedom. As a matter of fact, if you enter into a pure unison, it is irrevocable, and it is never pure till it is irrevocable. And when it is irrevocable, it is one way, like the path of a star.”
“Ha!” she cried bitterly. “It is the old dead morality.”
“No,” he said, “it is the law of creation. One is committed. One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.”
“I don’t trust you when you drag in the stars,” she said. “If you were quite true, it wouldn’t be necessary to be so far-fetched.”
“Don’t trust me then,” he said, angry. “It is enough that I trust myself.”
“And that is where you make another mistake,” she replied. “You don’t trust yourself. You don’t fully believe yourself what you are saying. You don’t really want this conjunction, otherwise you wouldn’t talk so much about it, you’d get it.”
He was suspended for a moment, arrested.
“How?” he said.
“By just loving,” she retorted in defiance.