"Tell me you love me ... tell me ... tell me you love me...."
He has said me, he has said you, as if it were possible to stand this shock on your breast without turning pale. He sees I am sinking and passes his irresistible arm about my body. The future tears itself to pieces at the bottom of my life. At the end of the Broad Walk the last golden ray goes down in a black mass. I do not know how to say these things, but I raise my head like a slow remonstrance and I hold my gaze up to him. Have I said everything?
Let us return. I can go no further. He takes my hand and presses it with the warm strength of his fingers. It is limp and inert, the palm lifeless and cold.
What have I done to deserve this diaphanous gloaming, this prolonged rhapsody rising about us? I have loved once already, and that counts I know. But if I had not had this great passion to love another man, if I did not still have it, would my heart be so clairvoyant? Would the new evening be as mild as it is? But if in spite of my deepened heart, I am not yet all-embracing and big enough?
We have gone the full length of the Broad Walk and back. Have we really gone so far? Behind us the view retreats into the opaque distance, and the whole pile, as mournful as a church abandoned by God, fades away slowly beneath a pall of silence. Our walk is almost at an end. We still have to cross a deserted spot, where thin bushes hold up their charred arms to support the slanting line of the gold and black rays.
Does he see this high dizzy instant passing close within our reach? I might snatch it perhaps but for these mad throbbings, this veil over my eyes, the dryness of my lips. Only the fragments of the instant reach me, but even they are beautiful enough to dazzle me.
He stops and faces me and his gaze fixes on my throat. Doubtless he too is catching the fragments....
What are you to do when you are a mere humble human being and have no power to retain the superhuman moments?
May my longing for truth at least flame out. My love of truth is my finest quality, my one merit. May it shake me as the wind shakes a tree, and may my hands, if they dare, rend these garments which hide me from his eye. Garments are a lie, and the moment is naked....