“You look ill, Lovelace,” I said.
“I am feeling ill,” he confessed.
“And so am I. Not sick in body, but sick in soul.”
“I also,” he said.
“Come nearer, Lovelace. Bend down. Now—” I lowered my voice almost to a whisper—“won’t you tell me? Please tell me.”
“It’s happened before in the world,” he said, “many times. Keats wrote about it in his ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’”
“But this is different,” I urged.
“No, I think not. It is much the same.”
“But that was poetry and this is madness.”
“All things are very much the same. Even fire and water are not so much opposed as we sometimes believe, and I remember being taught at school that diamonds and charcoal are first cousins.”