“Katherine!” he breathed hoarsely. “Katherine!” And he crushed her convulsively to him.
She lay thrilled in his arms.... After a minute they moved on, his arm about her waist, her arm about his neck. Rain, wind, thunder were forgotten. Forgotten were their theories of life. For that hour the man and woman in them were supremely happy.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CUP OF BLISS
The next morning Katherine lay abed in that delicious lassitude which is the compound of complete exhaustion and of a happiness that tingles through every furthermost nerve. And as she lay there she thought dazedly of the miracle that had come to pass. She had not even guessed that she was in love with Arnold Bruce. In fact, she had been resisting her growing admiration for him, and the day before she could hardly have told whether her liking was greater than her hostility. Then, suddenly, out there in the storm, all complex counter-feelings had been swept side, and she had been revealed to herself.
She was tremulously, tumultuously happy. She had had likings for men before, but she had never guessed that love was such a mighty, exultant thing as this. But, as she lay there, the thoughts that had never come to her in the storm out there on the River Road, slipped into her mind. Into her exultant, fearful, dizzy happiness there crept a fear of the future. She clung with all her soul to the ideas of the life she wished to live; she knew that he, in all sincerity, was militantly opposed to those ideas. Difference in religious belief had brought bitterness, tragedy even, into the lives of many a pair of lovers. The difference in their case was no less firmly held to on either side, and she realized that the day must come when their ideas must clash, when they two must fight it out. Quivering with love though she was, she could but look forward to that inevitable day with fear.
But there were too many other new matters tossing in her brain for her to dwell long upon this dread. At times she could but smile whimsically at the perversity of love. The little god was doubtless laughing in impish glee at what he had brought about. She had always thought in a vague way that she would sometime marry, but she had always regarded it as a matter of course that the man she would fall in love with would be one in thorough sympathy with her ideas and who would help her realize her dream. And here she had fallen in love with that dreamed-of man’s exact antithesis!
And yet, as she thought of Arnold Bruce, she could not imagine herself loving any other man in all the world.