“You cannot be saying these things to me!” she exclaimed, with a startled, incredulous face.
“Long ago I might have said them just as well,” I answered. “I have known always what an unnatural, self-saving woman you are, how treacherous you are to the impulse which brings you again and again to the verge of experience. There, in the act of embracing life, you suddenly freeze with selfish fear. Do you think life can be so cheated? If it cannot burn you it will wither you. When it is too late you may realize that to have one must give. Well, it is impossible of course. You cannot give yourself. The impulse is betrayed on the threshold. I knew it when I was fool enough to ask you to marry me.”
“You never asked me,” she said, thoughtfully, as reviewing a state of facts. “You only said you wanted to marry me.”
I construed it as a challenge. No, that is as I think of it now. What happened to me then was beyond any process of thought. It occurred outside of me, if that means anything. There was a sense of dissolving. Objects, ideas, place, planes, dimensions, my own egoistic importance, all seemed to dissolve in one significant sensation. There is a recollection that at this moment something became extremely vivid. What it was that became vivid I do not know. The word that comprehends without defining it is completion. In the whole world there was nothing else of consequence or meaning.
“I ask you now,” I said.
I heard my own words from afar. They were uttered by someone who had been sitting where I sat and for all I knew or cared might be sitting there still. I was a body moving through space, with a single anxiety, which was to meet another body in space for a purpose I could not stop to examine. I remember thinking, “I may. I may. The bargain is cancelled.”
She leaped to her feet, evading me, and laughed with her head tossed back,—an icy, brilliant laugh that made me rigid. I could not interpret it. I do not know yet what it meant. Nor do I comprehend the astonishing gesture that followed.
Slowly she moved to the African idol, picked it up, brought it to the mantel under a strong light and began to examine it carefully. She explored every plane of its surface and became apparently quite lost in contemplation of its hideous beauty. Holding it at arm’s length and still looking at it she spoke.
“Lord Porteous thinks it very ugly?”