"But mother is such a dear," she said. "I love her comfortable little plans. They are as touching as a child's. I wouldn't spoil her pleasure for anything. Tell me about the 'Gotterdämmerung'; it is all that which I want to learn. There's love in it, and tragedy, all big. Music says what you feel. Isn't that it? I can see it does to you when you play. And what music says to you, you, the fact of you, say to me."
Yet he felt this was exactly the same girl whom he had long known, comfortable, pleasant, pretty. The change was but the change that happens to a plant when the spike of blossoms shoots upwards from its heart, and was not so much change as growth. She had shot up, far away ahead of him with her budding stem, and all the time she thought she was reaching up to him. And he, gratified and a little embarrassed, thought so, too.
"You mustn't say such things to me," he said. "It makes me feel as if—as if you had put me on a pedestal, somehow. But it is true, that music says to me things which turn into ideas, longings, aspirations. But, so far from me teaching you what it means, it is you who have got to teach me. It is you who are the explanation of it all. Don't you see——"
He stopped a moment, trying himself to grasp the thought which eluded him. So, at least, he imagined to himself; in reality he sought the fire that should kindle him. And fire of a sort was not hard to find, for they sat alone together, and she, whom he liked and admired, clung to him. He kissed her and found himself nearer to passion than he had ever been yet.
"It must have been you that I was looking for," he said.
Again in her the tremulous flame of a girl's first love shot up, fed with the new fuel. Then, by a sudden impulse, she got up and stood a little away from him, passing her hand over her eyes.
"I feel as if it can't be," she said, "and yet when you say it is, I can't disbelieve you. But are you sure?"
He got up also.
"I tell you the truth when I say that I never cared like this before," he said. "All that I know of love is yours; you lit it."
She looked at him mutely, inquiring, scrutinizing. Something within her wanted more, wanted a conviction that she had not yet got. It was as if there was still some closed chamber in her heart that was not yet flooded; the tide did not flow freely throughout her. And for that moment's space she wondered if he, too, was in the same incomplete stress of emotion, if the entire abandonment which she knew she lacked held off from him.