"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a voice to my thought.
She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away, and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.
I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"You are so you," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing—and so strange too, so far off, that I feel—shy....
"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will vanish...."
I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"
"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is! Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to ordinary sensible affairs.... This beauty....
"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to know that it is so, that this life—no, not this life, but that life, is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death—just dead death—after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You don't want—particularly? I want to passionately. I want to live again—out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be free—as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free—an exquisite clean freedom....
"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for us—or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do—because they aren't—us.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't us, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive—if it is anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that will go on—go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that you and I must part to-day. It's as if—someone told me the sun was a little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."