"Oh Rag!" she said, with a face of tender beauty. He took her finger tips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.
"My dear," he cried, "my dear! why do you always want to turn love into—touches?... Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don't think I've ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you as one man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces...."
He stopped short.
She crouched before the fire at his feet. "Go on," she said, "go on."
"I feel now that all our lives now, Marjorie——We have come to a crisis. I feel that now——now is the time. Either we shall save ourselves now or we shall never save ourselves. It is as if something had gathered and accumulated and could wait no longer. If we do not seize this opportunity——Then our lives will go on as they have gone on, will become more and more a matter of small excitements and elaborate comforts and distraction...."
He stopped this halting speech and then broke out again.
"Oh! why should the life of every day conquer us? Why should generation after generation of men have these fine beginnings, these splendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then, then become—this! Look at this room, this litter of little satisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you have pecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewels attract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk from China! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is the very crown and best of our lives. And this is what we do, we sample, we accumulate. For this we loved, for this we hoped. Do you remember when we were young—that life seemed so splendid—it was intolerable we should ever die?... The splendid dream! The intimations of greatness!... The miserable failure!"
He raised clenched fists. "I won't stand it, Marjorie. I won't endure it. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life—and you with me. I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know...."
"But how?" asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staring into the fire. "How?"
"We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid, petty appeals...."