John Marcher thought. “Did you ask me that before?”
“No—I wasn’t so free-and-easy then. But it’s what strikes me now.”
“Of course,” he said after a moment, “it strikes you. Of course it strikes me. Of course what’s in store for me may be no more than that. The only thing is,” he went on, “that I think if it had been that I should by this time know.”
“Do you mean because you’ve been in love?” And then as he but looked at her in silence: “You’ve been in love, and it hasn’t meant such a cataclysm, hasn’t proved the great affair?”
“Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming.”
“Then it hasn’t been love,” said May Bartram.
“Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that—I’ve taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable,” he explained. “But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t what my affair’s to be.”
“You want something all to yourself—something that nobody else knows or has known?”
“It isn’t a question of what I ‘want’—God knows I don’t want anything. It’s only a question of the apprehension that haunts me—that I live with day by day.”
He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further impose itself. If she hadn’t been interested before she’d have been interested now.