“What did he say?” Joy demanded. “I saw he didn’t know you!”
“Well, I’ve changed since then. Funny I hadn’t thought of it that way. My hair’s bobbed now, of course—and I used to dress a lot more so, and this black velvet changes me more yet—and my make-up was different——”
“Will you tell me what he said—or won’t you?”
She whirled around from the mirror, and with a jump, seated herself on the bureau top. “After you went out, I slumped down on the window seat. My legs had caved in—I couldn’t stand any longer. And he came over to me and looked down at me—which he kept on doing, by the way. Joy, he likes to look at me. Did you notice it? Didn’t you? And then he said—he said—‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ I was knocked loggy for a minute. Did I? Hadn’t I! Then I passed back to him: ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘It is the only love which is formed without analysis,’ he said, ‘and analysis is death to love.’ ‘Maybe, with some people,’ I said. ‘You can’t generalize about those things—though I suppose love is one of the things that is most generalized about.’
“‘Do you want me to come down to particulars?’ he said. ‘Or is it safer to go on—generalizing?’” Jerry clenched her hands, smiling softly the while. “I laughed at that. I had to laugh or yell—it was all so like I’d been dreaming for so long—I can’t believe yet it’s all really happened—and I said: ‘Please don’t put it up to me.’ ‘Let us both waive the responsibility, then,’ he said. ‘If what I say sounds like sheer madness, forget it. You look as if you could forget, and had forgotten, much. But—I have fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was this evening, when I saw you come walking down the room to meet me, a spirit embodied from a dream.’ Joy, he said that! Was there ever anything like it under Heaven?”
“No!” cried Joy, hysterical with conflicting emotions. “Go on!”
Jerry jumped down from the bureau to look into the mirror again. “Jerry, your luck,” she cried to her triumphant reflection. “Your luck!” She turned to Joy. “I was so scared I got to shaking. ‘A dream,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s what it was, a dream all right.’ I thought it was, too. ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘How could I expect it—there will never be another Brushwood Boy.’ That was one of the things he had given me to read, Joy. I guess I registered a recognition on that, for he went on:
“‘Oh, you’ve read it? You remember the Brushwood boy saw a little girl in the theatre, and afterwards he built an image of her in his dreams. His image grew in his dreams to womanhood, and bye and bye he met her in the flesh—a spirit embodied from the dream. Two years ago, in those fleeting, hectic days of war, at a time when no dreams were being left to me, I met a little girl who somehow brought me back to interest in life and—dreams. Our relationship was of the most casual; I only saw her a few times before I was suddenly put in command of a company that was sailing. She was not the sort to mean anything in my life, and I almost forgot her as herself. But her image stayed with me, always growing in little ways. She herself was so unfinished an image—she was of a type that could not change its atmosphere and environment—yet there was that in her which made me build, until the image grew to womanhood in my dreams. Am I boring you with details of a girl you never knew? But you see—the image grew to womanhood—and then I met you in the flesh, the embodiment of that dream.’ I hadn’t stopped shaking. ‘I don’t understand, except that I remind you of someone you once knew,’ I said. ‘Nor do I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s of the realm of—dreams. It’s not to be believed. What is this that makes me sure you are the complement to my existence, the one woman with everything I want, the sum total of a man’s fatuous dream that is generally too impossible to find realization?’ ‘You’d better not spread words around so,’ I said. ‘It isn’t wise to talk freely about anything you only know by sight. If I were anyone else, I’d think you were crazy.’ He snapped me up on that. ‘If you were anyone else! I must descend to the supreme idiocy and say—But you are you—and I knew you were when you came walking down the room to-night.’ ‘You must be a Southern man,’ I said. ‘I’ve always heard that they swung this line.’ He never blinked at that. ‘Do you feel nothing?’ he said. ‘If you tell me you felt nothing when your eyes met mine—if you did not feel that we had been a long time finding each other—if you tell me that—why then,—I will start in and make you realize what I know to be true.’”
She stopped, and ran to the window with a trembling laugh. “Look at old New York—that I couldn’t look at this afternoon! Joy—to think of his saying that! Asking me if I didn’t feel that we had been a long time finding each other! Joy—I was so scared I’d slip a cog and come through with some pithy talk! I spoke slow and thought twice between each word. ‘I—I really—these flashes that seem to go between two people—I never analyze them—which you seem to be doing, after all.’
“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said; ‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something for which you, too, do not greatly care.’”