"All those kisses didn't keep the red on Rose Chéri's lips. They turned to evil gray ashes. Her jewel-bright eyes, back they sunk to blackness in their sockets. All that beauty and feeling—all that feeling, Ethan—wiped out." The living lovers clung together for a moment. "I suddenly saw," the girl went on, "for the first time in my life, really saw, that death wasn't a strange infrequent happening, but that everybody has the face turned that way. Yet, as I sit and tell you about it, the realization slips away—once more it's only words."
"Yes," he said, "that's part of Nature's colossal imposture."
At the word "imposture" she seemed to try to recapture the revelation of the afternoon.
"Dumas is dead," she murmured, looking across the bay from under knitted brows. "He felt all that, and yet he's dead. The beautiful woman and the strong man, they are now as if they'd never been here. Nothing availed them. His genius, her faith, her beauty, their love—futile, futile—they had to go. Were they alive as I'm alive?" She turned suddenly on her lover, in a kind of panic. "Did they feel life so keen a thing as we?"
"No, no; he hadn't you to love."
"Surely it was not like this, or they could not have died." She lay back in his arms and looked up at the full white moon. Presently she smiled. "As I sit here to-night I simply do not believe one little bit in this rumor of death—not as touching me. Other people—yes—only not me."
As she lifted her head from his shoulder and sat up so straight and sure, the man's nerves shrank under a sense of desertion. In a sudden access of physical pride and joyous sovereignty, she seemed to have cast him off, along with Rose Chéri and the rest of that great "nation that is not."
"No one was ever truly alive before," she was saying half to herself, her wide shining eyes turned upward to the stars. "That was why they died. But me—"
"Oh, my darling!" he said, bending towards her, "you are quick in every fibre and in every sense. The wild taste of life has stung your palate, and I sit and wonder how long—how long—" What need to finish, she must understand. But her thoughts were turned another way.