Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart; how could I help loving you?"
"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long. But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too much about it. And I am older than you."
He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I don't know how much, two or three years—"
"Five," she said.
"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes, whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband; but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"
She looked pleased, but she did not reply, and he went on.
"Do you still doubt me? Well, then, know that I have loved you from the very beginning, for love, when it comes, is a retroactive law of our being. If I had loved you less, if you had seemed less a part of me, I might have realized it sooner."
She shook her head. "I have known that I loved you for a long time, months," she said.
"Then you ought to have known I loved you," he answered quickly. "Don't you think it is possible to love with our souls, our subconsciousness, and realize with our slow brains, after months and years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them, and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't know anything; we simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amœba moves out of the shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be a truer, world."
"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.