"It doesn't set me free—not that I want to be set free. I love the burden and heat of the day. But this—this sets me thrilling. It clutches me at the heart, and makes my breath taste sharp, like steel, against my tongue. This is the wonder-time of day."
"Yes," he said, dreamily—"yes, in a sense, it is the wonder-time. No morning or high noon, anywhere up and down the world, can match this hour."
"But it makes you sad," she said, resentfully, as though he had spoken an ill thing of some one dear.
"No, I'm not sad any more; I'm reconciled. It is the moment when I can most easily forget my own existence, and feel melted into the general life."
She turned away with flashing eyes.
"Why are you so angry?" he said, softly, "or is it the sunset dyes you redder than it did?"
"That you can say such things so calmly, and at such a moment—with all this" (she opened her arms as if passionately to embrace the beauty of the world)—"all this spread out before us, with only you and me to see it, the unconscious world not caring that"—she snapped her quick white fingers in the lazy air. "You sit there saying the eyes that glory in it, the hearts that ache at the wonder of it, they are nothing; they are here to look on a moment, suffer, and die, while the great spectacle goes on and on and on. Why did we come here, then? What's the good of it?"
"I'll never tell you."
"I'd begin to believe some of your libels on life if I thought there wasn't more in it than just—"
"Just?"