"Now you are hair-splitting. Are you qualifying to contribute fictionized essays to the American magazines?"
"I am stating facts and don't care a hang about sarcasm. Just now you have spasms when some aspect of nature exalts you. I have watched you with considerable amusement. But it is natural enough—merely a sort of forerunner of what will happen when nature establishes her currents with your own interior landscapes. Then there will be earthquakes and hurricanes—your cultivated realism and inherent romanticism will become hopelessly mixed, and you will be really happy."
"More likely, such moments are the forerunners of a state which shall be an eternal exaltation. Personal immortality is only to be desired if it insures the lifting of our faculties to their highest power of expression. Anything else would mean a boundless ennui. As for my present inertia, is it not the duty of some few to pass their lives in appreciation of the past? Heaven knows there are enough looking out for the present. And I am sick of the superstition that love is all. I told you before that the happiness of women, at least, depended upon relegating it to its proper place. Once I regretted that Prestage did not die while I still believed in him, so that I could have lived my life with his memory, as Concha Argüello did with Rezánov's. But even that would have been a species of slavery, and I should have chafed at the bond; never had this divine sense of freedom."
"I pass over the majority of your arguments—I must sleep on them. But when have I maintained that love was all? If that were my doctrine should I be reading my head off, investing in Class A buildings, talking politics to farmers, and revolving plans for the conquest of California? I should be making love to you. That is what I should like to do, however, and what I propose to do when I am ready."
"Are you in love with me?"
"I hardly know, but I suspect that I shall be. If I deliberately choose you now as my life partner, you cannot complain that I am the mere slave of passion. I don't fancy I look it at this moment. I have had those fevers, and am willing to admit their brevity. No doubt if I had not been so occupied of late I should have had another. As it is, I am blessedly permitted to foresee it; and to keep my brain clear enough meanwhile to think for both of us."
"Very cousinly, but I can think for myself."
She had risen, but he stood with his back against the door for a moment.
"Another thing—" he said. "You need a buffer. You have remarkable powers, and you might realize some of your dreams if the prospect of initiatives did not alarm your secretly feminine soul. The two of us together could conquer the world. Now go ahead and dream until dreams pall and I have more time."