"For me!" she repeated weakly.
"Of course," he replied. "None of your arguments would have brought me here. If I have desired to understand this world at all, it is because it is your world. It is you I want—don't you understand that? I thought you would know it from the first moment you saw me!"
He was suddenly on his feet, leaning over her, a changed man, masterful, passionate. She opened her lips, but said nothing. She felt herself lifted up, clasped for a moment in his arms. Unresisting, she felt the fire of his kisses. The world seemed to have stopped. Then she tried to push him away, weakly, and against her own will. At her first movement he laid her tenderly back in her place.
"I am sorry!" he said. "And yet I am not," he added, drawing his chair close up to her side. "I am glad! You knew that I loved you, Louise. You knew that it was for you I had come."
She was beginning to collect herself. Her brain was at work again; but she was conscious of a new confusion in her senses, a new element in her life. She was no longer sure of herself.
"Listen," she begged earnestly. "Be reasonable! How could I marry you? Do you think that I could live with you up there in the hills?"
"We will live," he promised, "anywhere you choose in the world."
"Ah, no!" she continued, patting his hand. "You know what your life is, the things you want in life. You don't know mine yet. There is my work. You cannot think how wonderful it is to me. You don't know the things that fill my brain from day to day, the thoughts that direct my life. I cannot marry you just because—because—"
"Because what?" he interrupted eagerly.
"Because you make me feel—something I don't understand, because you come and you turn the world, for a few minutes, topsyturvy. But that is all foolishness, isn't it? Life isn't built up of emotions. What I want you to understand, and what you, please, must understand, is that at present our lives are so far, so very far, apart. I do not feel I could be happy leading yours, and you do not understand mine."