“Do you call that very simple?” John Marcher asked.
She thought a moment. “It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it.”
“You do understand it?” he eagerly asked.
Again she kept her kind eyes on him. “You still have the belief?”
“Oh!” he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.
“Whatever it’s to be,” she clearly made out, “it hasn’t yet come.”
He shook his head in complete surrender now. “It hasn’t yet come. Only, you know, it isn’t anything I’m to do, to achieve in the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I’m not such an ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were.”
“It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?”
“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.”
She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?”