She could not think it out or make it clear to herself, but she knew that it was surrender he was asking, and she knew that if she surrendered she would be no more to him in a little while than the other women of passage with whom his life was darkened.
Ought she not then to tell him, to keep him from living in false hopes? She persuaded herself that she ought, but she did not wish to spoil this delicious day. It was such torture to her when he blazed out at her and he became ugly with egoism.
“Of course,” he said, “the Ruth makes all the difference. I can’t let you go now, because you are the only one who has really understood my work. I am almost frightened of it myself, and it makes me feel desperately lonely when I think of all I shall have to go through to get at what it really means.”
“No. If you want me like that I don’t want you to let me go,” she said, “for it is so important.”
“Yes,” he said. “It may mean an entirely new kind of picture, for I don’t know anybody’s work that has quite what is hammering away in my head to get out. It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster.”
How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.
“You are like no other woman in the world to me,” he went on. “You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. You are the only person in the world whom I can place side by side with my mother.”
“You don’t know what it is to me,” she said, “to have a friend so strong and frank as you are.”
He put out his hand and laid it on her arm wonderingly, as if to satisfy himself that she was really there, much as on his first visit to Hampstead he had touched the grass.