But in what I have written of Sophocles and Plato the reader will divine, I hope, my intense love and admiration for Smith who led me, as Vergil led Dante, into the ideal world that surrounds our earth as with illimitable spaces of purple sky, wind-swept and star-sown!
If I could tell what Smith’s daily companionship now did for me, I would hardly need to write this book; for like all I have written, some of the best of it belongs as much to him as to me. In his presence for the first year and a half, I was merely a sponge, absorbing now this truth, now that, hardly conscious of an original impulse. Yet all the time, too, as will be seen, I was advising him and helping him from my knowledge of life. Our relation was really rather like that of a small, practical husband with some wise and infinitely learned Aspasia! I want to say here in contempt of probability that in all our years of intimacy, living together for over three years side by side, I never found a fault in him of character or of sympathy, save the one that drew him to his death.
Now I must leave him for the moment and turn again to Mrs. Mayhew. Of course I went to her that next afternoon even before three. She met me without a word so gravely that I did not even kiss her: but began explaining what Smith was to me and how I could not do enough for him who was everything to my mind as she was (God help me!) to my heart and body, and I kissed her cold lips while she shook her head half sadly.
“We have a sixth sense, we women, when we are in love”, she began: “I feel a new influence in you; I scent danger in the air you bring with you: don’t ask me to explain: I can’t; but my heart is heavy and cold as death.... If you leave me, there’ll be a catastrophe: the fall from such a height of happiness must be fatal.... If you can feel pleasure away from me, you no longer love me. I feel none except in having you, seeing you, thinking of you—none. Oh! why can’t you love like a woman loves, No! like I love: it would be heaven; for you and you alone satisfy the insatiable; you leave me bathed in bliss, sighing with satisfaction, happy as the Queen of Heaven!”
“I have much to tell you, new things to say”, I began in haste.
“Come upstairs,” I broke in interrupting myself “I want you as you are now, with the color in your cheeks, the light in your eyes, the vibration in your voice, come!”
And she came like a sad sybil. “Who gave you the tact?” she began while we were undressing, “the tact to praise always?” I seized her and stood naked against her body to body: “What new thing have you to tell me?” I asked, lifting her into the bed and getting in beside her, cuddling up to her warmer body.
“There’s always something new in my love,” she cried, cupping my face with her slim hands and taking my lips with hers.
“Oh, how I desired you yesternoon, for I took the letter to your house myself and I heard you talking in your room perhaps with Smith”, she added, sounding my eyes with hers; “I’m longing to believe it; but when I heard your voice, or imagined I did, I felt the lips of my sex open and shut and then it began to burn and itch intolerably. I was on the point of going in to you; but instead, turned and hurried away, raging at you and at myself—.”
“I will not let you even talk such treason,” I cried, separating her soft thighs, as I spoke, and sliding between them. In a moment my sex was in her and we were one body, while I drew it out slowly and then pushed it in again, her naked body straining to mine.