“But you can—you could help it.” His manner was agitated, and he spoke almost fiercely. “I am free,” he went on, and as she watched his eyes she understood why men feared him. “I do what I will. I am not accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You must take me as you find me or not at all.”
She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. “I love you,” he said. “Ah, how I love you—not because you love me, not because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as proudly.”
He drew along breath and his hand trembled. “If I were a traitor, then, if you loved me, you would say, ‘What! Is he to be found among traitors? How I love treason!’ If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves.”
“You know you have it.” She had been compelled by his mood and was herself in a fever. She looked at him with the expression which used to make his nerves vibrate. “You know that no human being ever was more to another than I to you. But you can’t expect me to be just the same as you are. I love you—not the false, base creature you picture. I admire the way you love, but I could not love in that way. Thank God, my love, my dear—I shall never be put to that test. For my love for you is my—my all.”
“We are very serious about a mere supposition.”
Howard was laughing, but not naturally. “We take each the other far too seriously. I’m sorry you idealise me so. Who knows—you might find me out some day—and then—well, don’t blame me.”
Marian said no more, but late that evening she put her hands on his shoulders and said: “You’re not hiding something from me—something we ought to bear together?”
“Not I.” Howard smiled down into her eyes and kissed her.
His mood of reaction, of hysteria had passed. He was thinking how little in reality she had had to do with his outburst. He had not been addressing her at all, except as she seemed to him for the moment the embodiment of his self-respect—or rather, of an “absurd,” “extremely youthful” ideal of self-respect which he had “outgrown.”