Hermia’s heart gave a bound. She turned to him with shining eyes. “How do you know that?” she murmured.
“Is it not true?”
“Yes,” she said, helplessly, “it is true.”
“Then I will tell you how I know. Because I have lived half my natural life with the population of my brain, and dream-people know one another. Ours have met and shaken hands while we have been exchanging platitudes.”
“That is very pretty,” said Hermia; “I hope their estates border upon each other, and that their chosen landscape is the same, for dream-people may have their antipathies, like the inhabitants of the visible world. Because we have taken out our title-deeds in dream-land, it does not follow that our tenants live in harmony.”
“It would not—except that we both instinctively know that there has not been even border warfare. There have been marriage and inter-marriage; the princes of my reigning house have demanded in state——”
Hermia interrupted him harshly: “There is no marriage or giving in marriage in my kingdom. I hate the word! Are you very much shocked?”
Cryder smiled. “No,” he said, “one is surprised sometimes to hear one’s own dearest theories in the mouth of another, but not shocked. It only needed that to make you the one woman I have wanted to know. You have that rarest gift among women—a catholic mind. And it does not spring from immorality or vulgar love of excitement—you are simply brave and original.”
Hermia leaned forward, her pupils dilating until her eyes looked like rings of marsh about lakes of ink. “You know that—you understand that?” she whispered, breathlessly.
Cryder looked her full in the eyes. “Yes,” he said, “and no one ever did before.”