‘I asked you if you had ever been in love. Please don’t answer if you don’t want to. After all, I am sure I should not have asked you.’
‘You can ask me anything you like,’ says Crosby with resignation. ‘Yours is to command, mine to obey. Yes’—comfortably, if surreptitiously, disposing himself on the tail of Susan’s gown—‘I acknowledge it. I have had my little disappointment. It was a frightful affair. I don’t believe anyone was ever so much in love as I was—then. I was just twenty-one, and she was just—something or other. It’s bad to remember a lady’s age. Any way, I know I loved her—I loved her,’ says Crosby, rising now to tragedy, ‘like anything. I can’t even at this hour speak of it without tears.’
‘Oh, nonsense! you’re laughing,’ says Susan, with fine disgust.
‘I am not, indeed. It is hysterics. If only you had gone through half what I have, I might expect a little sympathy from you. However, to continue. She was lovely, Susan, and she was tall—taller than you. She had coal-black eyes, and a nose that I have always considered Roman. I adored her. I used to walk about o’ nights looking at the moon (when there was one), and telling myself it was the image of her.’
‘The image of her! I must say I think you were hardly complimentary,’ says Susan, who seems to be on the look-out for slips. ‘There is nothing in the moon but a man, and a hideous one too—just like the clown at the circus.’
‘True’—reflectively. ‘Then it couldn’t have been the moon I compared her to. Perhaps’—thoughtfully—‘it was a star. Ah!’—joyfully—‘that’s it—my own particular star. See?’
‘No,’ says Susan contemptuously; and then: ‘I don’t believe you ever compared her to anything.’
‘I did—I did indeed, even quite lately,’ says Crosby. But this ambiguous speech receiving no recognition, he goes on: ‘If, as your contemptuous silence evidently means, Susan, you think me incapable of love, you are greatly in the wrong. I assure you I did compare her to that star. There was one special one; but somehow I can’t find it lately. It must have been removed, I think. And besides the star, I remember quite well being under a hallucination that led me to believe that the wettest day under heaven was full of sunshine when she was present; and that when she wasn’t present, no matter how brilliant the sky might be, that the sun never shone. Come, now, Susan; be just. That was real love, wasn’t it?’
‘I really don’t know,’ says Susan. There is a slight pause; then: ‘Go on.’
‘Go on?’