“Peter, I love you.”
“The love of a leprechaun?”
“No. The love of a man. A quite ordinary man.... Will you marry me, Peter?” he knelt crouching beside her, where she bent down to him from her seat.
“Peter, I shall always love you ... now and for ever and for all time. I want you near me, in my house, close up to me, bearing my name. My wife ... damn you, don’t laugh! I’m not pretending—I am an ordinary man. I refuse to be treated any longer as a freak. I want to go on a honeymoon with you, Peter, to Paris and Italy, where all nice people go. I want to be just happy. No; I want you to be happy. I’ll buy you a ring, and introduce you to my mother, and furnish a house with you, and give dinner-parties, and——”
“Stuart, are you mad?” she cried, aghast. For Stuart to behave so sanely was indeed a most alarming sign of madness in him.
“Will you marry me, Peter?”
“I might as well put on a hair-shirt for the rest of my existence.” Then she looked down at the round dark head tilted back on to her lap; met his elfish, yet strangely tender smile; and, with a tightening of love which was almost painful in its intensity, tried to fix the moment—this moment within sight and sound of him—to stand for the blank moment which she knew lay inevitably ahead of her. The girl had no illusions as to the fate of those who link their happiness with something not quite human. The last six months had taught her. The memory of them was like black seas rolling foamless on to a dark shore. When the next theory seized him....
Politely she enquired after the last.
“I’ve rolled it down the hill,” Stuart confessed. “But I’ve had enormous fun with it. I’ve sacrificed to it, and I’ve argued against it—that was with Aureole and Ber——” he stopped just in time, and hastily covered his blunder: “and I’ve dangled it in front of a disciple, and I’ve treated it like a football. Really, a theory is a most excellent occupation!” And then he told her about Letty and Sebastian.
Peter listened thoughtfully: