“I never can make out,” he said, “why you are more wonderful to me than anybody else. Directly I am with you, I am not so much happy as free. Even if I am miserable and you don’t make me any happier, I want you with me. . . . You mustn’t go away again.”
“No. I don’t want to go away.”
“Why need you actually go? Why shouldn’t you stay here now? Stay with me. Don’t go. Don’t think of going. I want you always with me. . . . If you don’t like the place we will find another studio and go there. And if you want to be married we can get married at once. I have nearly a hundred pounds in the bank.”
He knelt by her side and held her knees in his two hands. She took his face in her hands and said gently:—
“You mustn’t talk like that, Mendel. Please don’t think I don’t love you because I don’t want you to talk like that. It is the first thing to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne’s is to you. Do you understand me?”
He sprang to his feet and turned away from her.
“No, I don’t!” he shouted; “no, I don’t!”
He was wildly angry. Her words had acted like salt upon his raw feelings.
“No, I don’t understand you. You want love to be like art. You want to mix love up with art. Love belongs to life. Love is rich and ripe and warm. You want it to be like the dew on the grass. It can’t be!—it can’t be! Love bursts out of a man’s body into his soul, and you want it to live in his soul and to leave him with an impotent, cold body. You want me to bend to your woman’s will, for you know I cannot break away from you. You are with your soul like Oliver with her body. You are with your love like Oliver with her lust, and Logan and I are a pair—a miserable, broken pair.”
“Oh!” she cried, hiding her face in her hands. “You are wrong, wrong, hideously wrong. You have understood nothing at all. Your mind has rushed away with you. For God’s sake be quiet for a little, to see if we can’t get it straight.”