That day he went walking on the hills beyond Settignano, and the new light, the intoxication, persisted–the vision of himself as Aurora’s lover. Why not? An escape from the past, a different adventure from all prefigured in his dull expectations before.... In his theory of living Gerald had always admitted the gallant advisability of burning ships. There was room in his theory of living for just such a divergence from design as he now meditated. When the call comes, summon it to never so improbable places, the poet and artist obeys. He had gone to bed on the second night with these thoughts and a plan for the morrow.
Now that morrow was wearing to an end and all the floating splendid courageous thoughts and feelings, brave in the assurance, along with the determination, of victory, must be somehow caught and compressed and turned into the language–how poverty-stricken, how stale!–of a proposal of marriage; even as a great variegated, gold-shot, butterfly-tinted, cloud-light tissue of the Orient is drawn into a colorless whipcord twist that it may pass through a little ring.
396As he revolved in his mind what he should say to start with, Gerald saw appropriateness for the first time in the methods of the historic Gaul, who seized by her hair the charming creature whom he felt allied to him by deep things, seated her on the horse before him, and rode away. But what he would have liked so much the best would have been to lay his head in Aurora’s willing lap, embrace her knees tenderly, and have her understand all without a word being spoken.
Now he cleared his throat, took a reasonable air, a tone almost of banter, to say what, influenced by the long precedent of their converse together, he could say only in that manner, covering up as best he could the fact that his heart trembled and burned.
“Shall we resume our conversation of last Friday?” he asked, with a fine imitation of the comradely ease which had marked all their intercourse that day.
He was looking over the valley, as if still preoccupied with its beauty rather than with her.
Thus misled, she did not guess right. She said:
“About Charlie, you mean? Just fancy, I haven’t thought of him once all day! Little varmint! Don’t I wish I had the spanking of him! But I guess it would lame my arm.”
“Not about Charlie. I asked would you marry me, and you said you would not. Will you to-day?”
“Not for a farm!” she answered, with emphasis equal to her precipitation.