Marion looked deeply delighted, and at the same time agitated. “Huzza! Philip, I knew you must be a genius!” she exclaimed. “Of course it will go on—how can you help writing better and better. That is much better than inheriting other people’s money, which you don’t deserve, and which doesn’t really belong to you—not even so much as to other people. A thousand pounds in such a short time! We shall not need Mr. Grantley’s money at all.”
“Oh, you may find it useful to buy your bonnets and shawls with,” said Philip, laughing.
But Marion seemed not to hear him. She paced about the room, stopping now and then and humming some air to herself; and, finally, she seated herself at the piano and began to improvise, striking melodious and changing chords, sometimes soft and tender, sometimes resonant and tumultuous. Philip, who was more stirred and influenced by music than by almost anything else, especially by the kind of irregular and mysterious music that Marion was given to producing, sat near her, with his head on his hands, letting the harmonies sway and kindle his thoughts. When, at length, the music ceased, and Philip raised his head, he perceived that he and she were alone; Mrs. Lockhart had gone out.
“I shall always be a poet, as long as I have you to play to me,” said he. “Only, I shall never write such poetry as I think of while you play.”
“It does not take much to make two people happy, does it?” she said.
“Very little. Only love, the rarest thing in the world; and music, the next rarest; and a few other trifling matters of that sort,” returned he, with superb irony.
“Ah, my dear love, you know what I mean. All we need to be happy is each other, and what we can do for each other. Nothing else, except something to eat and drink, and a room to live in. I’m sure I’ve been happier in this house, with you, and with only money enough to keep alive on, than I ever was before, or expected to be.”
“Well, I have a theory about that,” said Philip, “though I’ve never worked it out. Love in a cottage is a good thing; and so is love in a palace. But love is not always of one quality; in fact, it never is the same in any two human beings. Sometimes it is simple and quiet and primitive; and then a cottage is the place for it; because, if we are to be at ease and content, what is outside of us ought to correspond to what is within, as the body to the spirit. But sometimes love is splendid, royal, full of every kind of spiritual richness and variety, continually rising to new heights of vision, plunging into new depths of insight, creating, increasing, living in wider and wider spheres of thought and feeling. And, for such love as that, a cottage is not the right environment. You must have a palace, a fortune, splendor and power; indeed, nothing can be too splendid, or splendid enough.”
“And could not such a love be happy without all that splendor?”
“Well, no—according to the theory! But, as I said, I haven’t completely worked it out yet. There is a certain kind of happiness, no doubt, in doing without what you know you ought to have; and, as a matter of fact, few or no people ever get just the surroundings they want, or ever are or expect to be entirely happy; and, perhaps, to be paradoxical, they wouldn’t be happy if they were. Imagination is a great factor in the account, and hope. The material world is too rigid and heavy ever to obey the behests of those two magicians; and so their best work has always been done in cloudland and dreamland. Perhaps, in the next world, nature—this phantasmagory of earth, sea and sky—will not be fixed and unchangeable as here, but pliant and adaptable to one thought and will: so that the statue which I see in my mind shall at once clothe itself in spiritual marble before my eyes; and the rocky island, which I imagine in yonder azure sea, shall straightway rise from the waves in all its tropic beauty; and yet, all this be not a dream or a fancy, but a reality as real and immortal as my own mind—which, after all, is the only reality. Reality has nothing to do with fixedness. Your lips of flesh and blood, my beloved Marion, are not so real as the kisses I give them, or as the love that goes into the kisses. Well—what were we talking about?”