He answered through his teeth. They might just as well have been fourteen again, and back on their skis up on Sparrow Hill. “You know very well why I put it in the attic. It was you put it there and not I. And you know it. But for some reason it amuses you to make me out stupid. Why? And it isn’t only ‘Noon’ you’ve put in the attic for me, but most of my æsthetic pleasures. You know perfectly well that I can’t hear great music or see a sunset without wanting to take them in my bare hands and rush to lay them in your lap. I can’t adore anything for its own sake. Even God. Beauty disrupts me, gives me anguish precisely in proportion to its loveliness, for the simple cause that I can so seldom share it with you. That’s what’s the matter with me. Or it has been that way until lately. Lately, thank God, I’ve almost been able to care about things for their own sakes again, as I did when I was a boy. Getting ‘Noon’ out again has helped, perhaps. I don’t know.”
He was exasperated. Weary. Now let dull misery rise again and entomb him where the sharp-pointed buds of spring could not pierce through. What was all their red-purple-gold to him!
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold ...
But Joan was appeased. Certainties which had quaked lately were stable again. Hugh adored her. Just now what she usually got only in his eyes and kisses, he had given her in words. For once and at last he was articulate, poor darling. Complacency, almost amounting to beatitude, reëstablished itself in her psyche. But it was a beatitude just tainted, curdled rather, with scorn. Joan regretted the curdle. But it was inevitable. For it is a law of the heart, she realized, that love given so completely as Hugh’s was given, with nothing reserved, can never have its like in return. “And it’s a pity,” she thought a little bitterly. “For if I could be absolutely sure of a love like Hugh’s, and return it, it would be bliss. The trouble is, one can’t. It’s against nature.” Wistfully, some lines from an Irish poet echoed through her mind.
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women, if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss.