“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her, but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?
“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were fifteen years younger and of your own world—”
“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”
“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic musings.”
“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment. I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older, and, somehow, different.”
“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”
She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you intend to go there some day?”
“Long before my voice has gone, I hope. If I could create a furore in London I should not hesitate to go to New York at once. And—after all—it is my own city; as much mine as if I had been born there, for I went so young. The hatred I felt for it when I left has fled—with the memory of other things; I dream of it now sometimes, and love every stone of it. One can never continue to hate one’s own city, which must always stand out in the memory as one’s best friend. Besides, when you look down upon the world—Society—from one of its own pedestals, nothing matters; no one can hurt you.”
“Would any one try to hurt you?” he asked anxiously. “Do you fear any one now?”
“Not here. But if I went to the land of the free to interpret an unpopular master unprotected by personal fame,—which, in American eyes, only London can give, and only New York set the final seal upon,—I should be hounded into the Hudson River.”