“Well—there is one thing you can do. If you dare.”
“What is it?”
He made no answer for some seconds. Then he turned round and sat looking at her. Their eyes met....
The grey of his mind began to colour. Her face was white and she was looking at him, in fear and perplexity. A new tenderness for her sprang up in him—a new feeling. Hitherto he had loved and desired her sweetness and animation—but now she was white and weary-eyed. He felt as though he had forgotten her and suddenly remembered. A great longing came into his mind.
“But what is the other thing I can do?”
It was strangely hard to say. There came a peculiar sensation in his throat and facial muscles, a nervous stress between laughing and crying. All the world vanished before that great desire. And he was afraid she would not dare, that she would not take him seriously.
“What is it?” she said again.
“Don’t you see that we can marry?” he said, with the flood of his resolution suddenly strong and steady. “Don’t you see that is the only thing for us? The dead lane we are in! You must come out of your cheating, and I must come out of my ... cramming. And we—we must marry.”
He paused and then became eloquent. “The world is against us, against—us. To you it offers money to cheat—to be ignoble. For it is ignoble! It offers you no honest way, only a miserable drudgery. And it keeps you from me. And me too it bribes with the promise of success—if I will desert you ... You don’t know all ... We may have to wait for years—we may have to wait for ever, if we wait until life is safe. We may be separated.... We may lose one another altogether.... Let us fight against it. Why should we separate? Unless True Love is like the other things—an empty cant. This is the only way. We two—who belong to one another.”
She looked at him, her face perplexed with this new idea, her heart beating very fast. “We are so young,” she said. “And how are we to live? You get a guinea.”