"Who better among men should I know after all that passed between us? And did you not first know me?"
"That is not the same thing. I am twenty years older, but you—I can hardly believe my eyes—are the girl of twenty years ago. Has time, too, been fooled by those eyes of yours which I have often said would split a lover's coffin?"
"Believe me, my friend, Time's ravages are here as surely as that you will never see them. It is your love now, as ever, that blinds your eyes and drapes a faded woman in your poetry. When I am dead, and my body an ordinary for worms, you will see me still in fancy's eye just the girl you see me now. And by the same token you, that speak of being twenty years older, are in my eyes the brave and innocent boy whose lips were once my food."
"Then you loved me all the time, after all?"
"At that age, what did I know of love—or loathing?"
"But the Rabbi?"
"He is old," she cried, "past passion. Ah, Haquin, you would not know him now!"
"I cannot make it out that you are still sweet and twenty. Here is a waist would warm the arm of death! You are, if anything, lovelier, transfigured, haloed. You would hurry the pace of a star! Tell me true now, is it not some elixir of the Rabbi's that has pinnacled you beyond the teeth of Time?"
She laughed.
"Elixir of his! Why he would swallow it himself! And to prove how little I lean on him you may kill him if you will!