Now as she sat looking, with her rapt gaze, at the man before her, she was thinking how absolutely and without reservation was her surrender to those particular qualities which Roger Adams did not represent. Here, at this approaching crisis in her experience, it might have been supposed that her sense of humour would have lent something of its brilliance as a safeguard, but the weakness of her temperament lay in the very fact that her humour entered only into those situations where it could ornament without modifying the actual conditions of thought—that she devoted to her passion for Kemper, as to the other merely temporary phenomena of the senses, a large intensity of outlook which only the eternal could support with dignity.
Her gaze dropped back from the heights, and he felt that she became less elusive and more human.
"I've thought of you so often and so much," she remarked with her smile of cordial sweetness.
"Not so often as I've thought of you." He laid, as he spoke, a folded paper upon the desk, "There's an English review of the poems. It's rather good so I thought you might care to see it."
She unfolded the paper; then pushed it from her with an indifferent gesture. "It seems so long ago I can hardly believe I wrote them," she returned, conscious as she uttered the mere ordinary words of a subdued yet singularly vivid excitement, which seemed the softer mental radiance left by an illumination which was past.
"I wonder why it should seem long to you," said Adams slowly. "I remember you used to complain that one was obliged to fly through phases of thought in order to test them all."
"I'm not sure that I want to test them all now," she replied. "When one gets to a good place one would better stop and rest."
"Then you are in a good place?" he asked, looking at her intently from his short-sighted eyes, which appeared to contract and narrow since he had taken off his glasses.
"I don't know," she evaded the question with a smile, "but if I am, I warn you, I shall stand still and rest."
He laughed softly. "I dare say you're right, if there's such a state as rest on the earth," he answered.