She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled fire. She came down to earth abruptly.
“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we shall take cold.”
But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”
“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.
“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”
“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”
“Suppose I never do awaken.”
“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”
“I?”
“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”