I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already, when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.
‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning—
“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?
‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear, fresh, expansive way. ‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife, the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was dreaming.’
I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:
‘And if they recognised in a critical flash
From the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,
His need of—say a woman to perish for,
The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,
Do no harm, save to himself—?’