“But people get tired of what they have.”
“It's what they don't have that makes them old and tired,” he told her with sudden prescience; “when I think of what I am going to lose, of what I can never have, it makes me crazy.”
“Why do you say that?... How can you know?”
She was standing close to him in the constricted space, the tangible shock of her nearness sweeping over him in waves of heady emotion. The water gurgling by the rock was the only sound in a world-stillness.
“I mean you.”
“Well, I'm not fairy gold; I'm not the end of the rainbow. I am just Eliza.”
“Just Eliza!” he scoffed. Then the possibility contained in her words struck him dumb. The feeling irresistibly returned that because of her heavenly ignorance, her charity, she mistook him to be worthy. The necessity to guard her from her own divinity impelled him to repeat, miserably, all that she had ignored.
“I'm not much account,” he said laboriously; “you see, I never stuck at anything, and, somehow, things have never stuck to me. It was that way at school—I was expelled from four. I'm supposed to be shiftless.”
“I don't care in the least for that!” she declared; “only one thing is really important to me... something, oh, so different.” Suddenly she laid her hand upon his sleeve, and, pitifully white, faced him. “I've had the beautifullest feeling about you,” she whispered; “Anthony, tell me truly, are you... good?” A sob rose uncontrollably in his throat, and his eyes filled with tears that spilled over his cheeks. For a moment he struggled to check them, then, unashamed, slipped onto his knees before her and held her tightly in his arms. “No one in the world can say that I am not—what you mean.”
She stooped, and sat beside him on the stone, holding his hand close to her slight body. “My dream,” she said simply. “I didn't understand it at first; you see, I was only a child. And then when I grew older, and—and heard things, it seemed impossible. That sort of goodness only bored other girls... they liked men of the world, men with a past. I thought perhaps I was only morbid, and lost trust in—in you.”