"As though I could forget a moment of our time, my sweet," said Paul. "It needs no feasts or roses—only whatever delights you to do, delights me too."
"Paul," she cooed after a while, during which her hand had lain in his and there had been a soft silence, "is not this a life of joy, so smooth and gliding, this way of Venice? It seems far from ruffles and storms. I shall love it always, shall not you? and you must come back in other years and study its buildings and its history, Paul—with your new, fine eyes."
"We shall come together, my darling," he answered. "I should never want anything alone."
"Sweetheart!" she cooed again in his ears; and then presently, "Paul," she said, "some day you must read 'Salammbo,' that masterpiece of Flaubert's. There is a spirit of love in that which now you would understand—the love which looked out of Matho's eyes when his body was beaten to jelly. It is the love I have for you, my own—a love 'beyond all words or sense'—as one of your English poets says. Do you know, with the strange irony of things, when a woman's love for a man rises to the highest point there is in it always an element of the wife? However wayward and tigerish and undomestic she may be, she then desires to be the acknowledged possession and belonging of the man, even to her own dishonour. She desires to reproduce his likeness, she wants to compass his material good. She will think of his food, and his raiment, and his well-being, and never of her own—only, if she is wise she will hide all these things in her heart, for the average man cannot stand this great light of her sweetness, and when her love becomes selfless, his love will wane."
"The average man's—yes, perhaps so," agreed Paul. "But then, what does the average person of either sex know of love at all?"
"They think they know," she said. "Really think it, but love like ours happens perhaps once in a century, and generally makes history of some sort—bad or good."
"Let it!" said Paul. "I am like Antony in that poem you read me last night. I must have you for my own, 'Though death, dishonour, anything you will, stand in the way.' He knew what he was talking about, Antony! so did the man who wrote the poem!"
"He was a great sculptor as well as a poet," the lady said. "And yes, he knew all about those wonderful lovers better far than your Shakespeare did, who leaves me quite cold when I read his view of them. Cleopatra was to me so subtle, so splendid a queen."
"Of course she was just you, my heart," said Paul. "You are her soul living over again, and that poem you must give me to keep some day, because it says just what I shall want to say if ever I must be away from you for a time. See, have I remembered it right?
"'Tell her, till I see Those eyes, I do not live—that Rome to me Is hateful,—tell her—oh!—I know not what—That every thought and feeling, space and spot, Is like an ugly dream where she is not; All persons plagues; all living wearisome; All talking empty…'.