The November twilight, scintillant with stars, lay darkly ahead. He forged through it in excitement. He who could forecast with the wisdom of experience the duration of his own enslavement had gone over his time. And, powers of wild-fire, he still kept going! Something emotionally was wrong.
It pleased him in a moody moment to busy himself with mathematics, much as he hated them, and deduce a singular fact. He had spent delicious hours of many a day with many a maid. But days and days and days with one? Not ever!
For one hour he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if Christmas still found him turbulent and upset—and hating the thought of the studio? This furlough of his from work and worry must come to an end in time!
Paralyzed by an infinite variety of prospects he stopped dead and stared at the fading red behind the hills. When had it altered—this madness of his? Why was it stronger? Any man addicted to falling in love knew well enough it shouldn't be.
It was his fate to remember as he stood there the talk of love around the wood-fire. He had barely listened. Yet now his memory cast up Kreiling's words and took his breath away.
"There is love and love and to be in love is torture and a thing of self but when the big splendid tenderness comes after the storm of self and craving, the tenderness that knows more of giving than of demanding, it comes to stay. But it's not the love of barbarity like Finn's. It's an evolution."
To stay! … The thought was volcanic. … To stay!
And yet … how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that filled his heart with humility and longing! … How far away that day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! … An eternity lay between.
This love of his—no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!
Kreiling was right.