Gerald stood, very collected, if a trifle pale, holding, like a proper votary, a bouquet–starry handful of sweet white hedge-roses,–which he offered as soon as Aurora entered, saying he had picked them for her that morning in the country near Castel di Poggio.
The meeting, in Aurora’s jubilant sense of it, went off beautifully. She said in a pleasant, easy tone and her company English,
“So you’ve got back. It’s awfully nice to see you again. How well you are looking. I was sure a change would do you good.”
And Gerald said yes, he had found the sea air tonic. He had been staying with the Johns, Vincent’s mother lived in Leghorn. He had worked a little, made a few drawings. Digressing, he mentioned a trifling gift he had brought her, and produced a small brass vessel, fitted with two hinged lids, meant to contain grains of incense for the altar. He said he had found it in an antiquarian’s shop and thought she might care for it to drop her rings into; 424he supposed she took them off at night. Its shape seemed to him to possess more than common elegance.
Aurora called it adorable, and his giving it to her sweet. They talked as if they had been making believe, for the benefit of an audience, to be the most ordinary friends.
And each of them meanwhile, with heart and head gone slightly insane in secret, was considering a marvel. The long separation–it had been long to them–had recreated for both something of the capacity to receive a fresh impression of the other. The marvel to Aurora was that this choice being, with his intellectual brow (that was her adjective for Gerald’s brow) his difference from others, all in the way of superiority to them, the indescribable fascination residing in his every feature, mood, or word, should be walking the world unclaimed and unattached, for her to take if she were so minded. Her to take! It was vertiginous.
And the marvel to him was, in beholding that bounteous temple of a soul, with its radiance of life, its share, so rich, of the mysterious something which made the earliest men care to build homes; its gifts, so large, of comfort and warmth–the marvel was that he should have dared aspire to conquer it, should have set that to himself as a thing he was going to persevere in trying to do until–until he had done it, he, puny, poor in inducements, light of weight.
The two of them, there could be no doubt of it, had passed within the portals after which a change comes over the eyes, and those who enter see each other endowed with qualities raising the capacity for wonder to an ecstasy: so much engaging beauty, so much dearness, are not to be believed!... It can never be established whether the 425eyes only see truly when under this charm, or whether then more than at other times illusion makes of them its fool.
If he had been analytical on the subject of his sentiment for Aurora, as so often on other subjects, and said to himself that he saw this woman in a golden transfiguring light because he was in good primordial fashion in love with her–because, that is to say, obscure affinities of flesh and blood united with the esteem created by her virtues to make of him a candle which the touch of her finger-tip miraculously could light–he would have felt it as a blessed and not a base secret at the bottom of his attachment.
While they talked of the weather, as they fell to doing when they had disposed of the subject of the little incense-holder; and, after that, while they talked of Leghorn and the various seaside places which Aurora had to choose from for her summer sojourn, a vastly deep conversation was taking place between them, which we think it not amiss to report, because by the nature of things the words they would say aloud on this occasion would be meager and colorless by comparison with the things they would feel and to some extent convey to each other through mere proximity.