But this mood also was a transient one; hours followed, when she no longer sought and questioned, but when she gave, recklessly, in a wild endeavour to lose the sense of twofold being. And before these outbreaks, the young man was helpless. His past life, and such experience as he had gathered in it, grew fantastic and unreal, might all have belonged to some one else: the sole reality in a world of shadows was this soft human body that he held in his arms.
Point by point, however, each of which wounded, consciousness fought itself free again. Such violent extremes of emotion were, in truth, contrary to his nature. They made him unsure. And, as the pendulum swung back, something vital in him made protest.
"Sometimes, it seems as if there were something else ... something that's not love at all ... more like hate—yes, as if you hated me ... would like to kill me."
Her whole body was moved by the sigh she drew.
"If I only could! Then I should know that you were mine indeed."
"Is it possible for me to be more yours than I am?"
"Part of you would never be mine, though we spent all our lives together."
He roused himself from his lethargy. "How can you say that?—And yet I think I know what you mean. It's like a kind of rage that comes over one—Yes, I've felt it, too. Listen, darling!—there are things one can't say in daylight. I, too, have felt ... sometimes ... that in spite of all my love for you—I mean our love for each other—yet there was still something, a part of you, I had no power over. The real you is something—some one I don't really know in spite of all the kisses. Yes"—and the more he tried to find words for what he meant, the more convinced he grew of its truth. "Nothing keeps us apart; you love me, are here in my arms, and yet ...yet there's a bit of you I can't influence—that is still strange to me. How often I have to ask you why you look at me in a certain way, or what you are thinking of! I never know your thoughts; I've never once been able to read them; you always keep something back.—Why is it, dear? Is it my fault? If I could just once get at your real self—if I knew that once, only once, in all these weeks, you had been mine—every bit of you—then ... yes, then, I believe I would be satisfied to ... to—I don't know what!"
He had spoken in an even, monotonous voice, almost more to himself than to her. Now, however, he was forced to the opposite extreme of anxious solicitude. "No, no, I didn't really mean it. Darling! ... hush!—don't cry like that. I didn't know what I was saying; it isn't true, not a word of it."
She had flung herself across him; her own elemental weeping shook her from head to foot. He realised, for the first time, the depth and strength of it, now that it, as it were, went through him, too. Gathering her to him, he made wild and foolish promises. But nothing soothed her: she wept on, until the dawn crept in, thinly grey, round the windows. But when it grew so light that the objects in the room were recovering their form, she fell asleep, and he hardly dared to breathe, for fear of disturbing her.