It was nature's signal, stronger in its frailty than any attained art of woman; and he answered to it as man has ever answered—ever will answer.
"Oh, my love!" he cried. "My love!" And his arms went round her.
It is sacrilege to attempt analysis of birth or love or death. Death and birth, the mysteries! Love, the revelation! Man, as he has existed through all time, had being in Blake's embrace; woman, as she has been from the first, lived in Maxine's leap of the heart, her leap of the spirit as the ecstasy of his touch thrilled her. Here was no coldness; here was no sensuality. Divinity manifested itself, no longer above, but within them. The lights in the sky were divine, but so were the lights of the town. Divinity fired their souls, merging each in each; but as truly it fired their clasping hands, their lips trembling to kiss.
Maxine—removed by fabulous distances from Max, from the studio, from all accepted things—breathed her wonderment in an unconscious appeal.
"Speak to me!"
And Blake, awed and enraptured, whispered his answer.
"There is nothing to say that you do not know. I worship you. I bent my knee and kissed the hem of your garment the first moment it brushed my path. There is nothing to say that you do not know. I have waited all my life for this."
"All your life?"
"All my life. But love is not reckoned by time. One dreams—and one wakes."
"You dreamed—" She closed her eyes, her ears drank in the cadences of his voice.