“Then love me,” she answered, “and leave all the things that bother you. Love me! Here I am!”
“But!—”
“No!” she said.
“Well, have your way.”
So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together and Beatrice talked to me of love....
I’d never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads—with never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.
“Why do people love each other?” I said.
“Why not?”
“But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?”
“And why do I love you?” she asked; “not only what is fine in you, but what isn’t? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do. To—night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!”...