Now his golden outburst of laughter stopped her. He shouted:
"See! There you go! As if to preach me the final word of love and hate! You'd hate me now, just because I tease you! If I said, with poets' roses twining through the saying, that you were most beautiful and no-end intellectual and beyond that of the heart of an angel, could you not better tolerate me? And thus we come to the open pathway to most human loves and hates; two little doors standing side by side. For, I ask you, going back to your challenge to make men love rather than despise me, what in the devil's name is that sort of love but transplanted self-love? A damned-fool sort of selfishness masking like a hypocrite as something quite different.... If you loved a man who beat you there would be something worth while in that sort of loving; something divorced from plain selfishness and the eternal I-want-to-get-all-I-can-out-of-everything! Now, I love you! I love you so that my love for you comes near killing me! It gets me by the throat at night. That's love; and there's less of self in it, I swear to you, than there is of ... you!"
"You! You talk of love. To me!"
She broke into her light, taunting laughter. And yet he had set her heart beating and the ancient fear ... not fear of him ... was upon her. "You, talking of love, are like a blind man lecturing on the colors of the rainbow! You...."
But he had started to his feet; his eyes went suddenly toward the camp, all sight of which they had lost on coming down into the creek bed.
"Listen!" he cried. "What was that?"
She had heard nothing; nothing above the splash and fall of water ... and the beating of her own heart.
"Listen!" he said the second time.
"What is it?"
He caught up his rifle and leaped across the creek. He began running, back toward their camp.