'Depends what they are.'
'No, I mean independently of what they are. I don't know what strong emotion is. I don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. I am much interested in many things, but impersonally. Now, you—you have adored, and you have been adored. I have sat and looked on. Does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?'
Bertie considered this a moment.
'You never cease to feel things,' he said. 'A thing that has been exquisitely sweet becomes bitter, and continues bitter. You taste the jam first, and the powder afterwards.'
He turned to the mantelpiece, took up a cigarette, and then, with a sudden trembling hand, threw it into the grate.
'And you pay for it all,' he said—' you pay over and over again. Good-night, Ginger.'
CHAPTER XV
It was a glorious blue and golden morning in early June, and the soft brilliant sunshine of English summer weather flooded the glades of the park at Molesworth, where Amelie, intent on the finishing of a water-colour sketch, sat on a fallen tree-trunk, and Bertie lay on the grass by her side reading at intervals to her from a volume of Tennyson he had brought out with him. She was almost too busy with her painting to follow very clearly what he read, but the sound of his voice thrilled her with a big, quiet happiness, and when he was silent, the consciousness of his presence by her was hardly less vivid. All the same, she was attending very closely to what she was doing, and her brush industriously recorded what the upward sweep of her gray eyes had noted before she bent them again with bowed head on her sketch.
Indeed, that which lay before her was very well worth her attention. In front of them lay a sward of fine-woven turf, and from under the shade of the huge oak which spread its living canopies of green above them they looked through aisles of noble trees into the open, heathery ground of the far distance. The cool greenness, dim and subaqueous in tone, stretched to right and left of them in all shades of colour; here underneath the oak it was dark and almost sombre; there, where a clean-limbed, slender beech foamed up in the freshness of its pale foliage into the blue cup of heaven, the colour was enchantingly vivid and delicate, as if to match, even as the rose-colour of youthful cheeks matches the slender litheness of the frame, the girlish grace of the tree itself. Flecks of sunlight lay like spangles on the grass below the trees, and in spaces between them the blue blaze of the June day poured down on to the flower-decked grass. The last of the bluebells still lingered in shady places, as if pieces of sky had fallen there; tall fox-gloves rose in spires of blossoms through thickets of bramble; buttercups made a sunlight of their own, and in the shelter of scattered coppices the pale wind-flowers still dreamed in whiteness.