There were closer points in the comparison than he supposed—though the world does not equally admire the man who imperils the safety of his life and him who risks the peace of it—but perception of them would not have changed his mind.
He stayed because he could not go.
The morning of the day that followed was spent by every one on the shady lawn. It was too hot for even the theory of movement, and plans were postponed until the afternoon. Terence had meant to sketch a piece of stonework at Ewelme Church, but found himself engaged by his hostess to drive her to Nuneham.
Whether she intended to go there or not, she pleaded the heat as an excuse for deferring the start till it became too late to make one.
They had tea in the little Doric shrine that overlooked the river, and she took him afterwards up to the wood that rose behind the house.
Seated on a stile within it, against which he leaned, she told him the dream with which her eyes had been clouded the day before; told it with a hesitating persuasiveness which made dissent seem brutal; the dream of an ethereal alliance to which the man should bring a life, and the woman a use for it.
Terence listened stupefied as the naïve unsteady voice made out its astounding offer. She had gathered somehow his desire for such a thing; the magnifying power of her vanity must have revealed it in all he did and said. And her abysmal lack of humour concealed its grotesque disparities. He, so it seemed, was to contribute his existence, and she, a smile.
But if its seriousness was an absurdity, its absurdities were serious. Terence heard them with grave lips; heard in them, too, the diffident whispers of his pity swollen by her fancy to a blare of passion.
It was serious enough as she sounded it, and sad enough too. Disillusionment, even the gentlest, seemed out of the question.
How, to a woman who rides, triumphing in his devotion, through the barriers of her decorum, is a man to say, "I do not love you"?