"Is it—wonderful?"
"Like nothing else on earth. Everything else seems—poor and cheap—beside it."
He drew a step nearer. "But you couldn't love—not yet," he said. "You haven't had the experience. You will have to learn."
"You don't know me," she cried. "I have been teaching myself ever since I was a little girl. I've thought of nothing else most of the time. Oh—" she clasped her white hands against her small bosom—"if I ever have the chance, how much I shall give!"
"I know it! I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than ever man was before." His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way. But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will give—how much you will love—I've felt it from the second time I saw you—perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me as you do—who drew me as you do—against my ambition—against my will. I—I——"
He had been fighting against the words that would come in spite of him. He halted now because the food of emotion suffocated speech. He stood before her, ghastly pale and trembling. She did not draw back. She seemed compelled by his will, by the force of his passion, to stay where she was. But in her eyes was a fascinated terror—a fear of him—of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of infinite longing realized.
"I have frightened you?" he said.
"Yes," was her whispered reply.
"But it is your dream come true."
She shrank back—not in aversion, but gently. "No—it isn't my dream," she replied.