“I know I’ve no right to call you anything, but to myself I always call you Guida, and sweetheart too, and I’ve liked to think that you would care to know my thoughts,” he answered.
“Yes, I wish I knew your thoughts,” she responded, looking up at him intently; “I should like to know every thought in your mind.... Do you know—you don’t mind my saying just what I think?—I find myself feeling that there’s something in you that I never touch; I mean, that a friend ought to touch, if it’s a real friendship. You appear to be so frank, and I know you are frank and good and true, and yet I seem always to be hunting for something in your mind, and it slips away from me always—always. I suppose it’s because we’re two different beings, and no two beings can ever know each other in this world, not altogether. We’re what the Chevalier calls ‘separate entities.’ I seem to understand his odd, wise talk better lately. He said the other day: ‘Lonely we come into the world, and lonely we go out of it.’ That’s what I mean. It makes me shudder sometimes, that part of us which lives alone for ever. We go running on as happy as can be, like Biribi there in the garden, and all at once we stop short at a hedge, just as he does there—a hedge just too tall to look over and with no foothold for climbing. That’s what I want so much; I want to look over the Hedge.”
When she spoke like this to Philip, as she sometimes did, she seemed quite unconscious that he was a listener, it was rather as if he were part of her and thinking the same thoughts. To Philip she seemed wonderful. He had never bothered his head in that way about abstract things when he was her age, and he could not understand it in her. What was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she worked things out for herself. Her words were her own, and not another’s. She was not imitative, nor yet was she bizarre; she was individual, simple, inquiring.
“That’s the thing that hurts most in life,” she added presently; “that trying to find and not being able to—voila, what a child I am to babble so!” she broke off with a little laugh, which had, however, a plaintive note. There was a touch of undeveloped pathos in her character, for she had been left alone too young, been given responsibility too soon.
He felt he must say something, and in a sympathetic tone he replied:
“Yes, Guida, but after a while we stop trying to follow and see and find, and we walk in the old paths and take things as they are.”
“Have you stopped?” she said to him wistfully. “Oh, no, not altogether,” he replied, dropping his tones to tenderness, “for I’ve been trying to peep over a hedge this afternoon, and I haven’t done it yet.” “Have you?” she rejoined, then paused, for the look in his eyes embarrassed her.... “Why do you look at me like that?” she added tremulously.
“Guida,” he said earnestly, leaning towards her, “a month ago I asked you if you would listen to me when I told you of my love, and you said you would. Well, sometimes when we have met since, I have told you the same story, and you’ve kept your promise and listened. Guida, I want to go on telling you the same story for a long time—even till you or I die.”
“Do you—ah, then, do you?” she asked simply. “Do you really wish that?”
“It is the greatest wish of my life, and always will be,” he added, taking her unresisting hands.