"How you look at me.... Your eyes probe to the depths.... Yes. That is it.... You do see, don't you? I love him.
"Perhaps the confession, which is so long, so long in beginning and has weighed so heavily, is already finished?... No. Since my eyes are overflowing, I have not yet made it. Well, listen, I have no idea any more of what I am going to tell you, but don't interrupt, let me say everything....
"Oh, I wanted to speak in orderly sequence, and I promised myself I should not be moved but would talk to you quite simply. When I came in, I felt I was growing and rising. I heard my own words stirring like live things.... But they are trivial; they hurt me so I wish I could find others.
"To think that here at this window we have so often talked of love, not of our love, but of all love. You remember? You used to say—I think it was you: 'What is beautiful is not the face you love so dearly, it is the need to love it dearly. What matters is not the delirium in which two people lose themselves, but the truth they discover.' And when you and I evoked those two rays of light which are one, love and truth, our words were so vast that we had to stop talking.
"This evening—do you know why?—instead of telling their splendid secret my words are mere splinters ripping my throat.... Yet when we used to talk here, I did not know love was so beautiful; we did not say it was.
"You certainly saw the change in me, and you guessed. The morning when you stopped in front of me and restrained the exclamation in your breast, I was sure you knew. Perhaps it was very apparent. I came and went in a radiance; the house grew chilly, everything in the house was conscious of it and unnatural. Evenings I worked later and later, as if I were afraid of falling asleep, and when we discussed things, it was I who explained, I who knew. You must have seen, too, how often I buried myself in silence, content in it sometimes, then tortured.
"You observed me. There was no reason for speaking one day rather than another?
"A reason has arisen.
"It was yesterday evening. Walking beside him I suddenly realized that in him, in us, in me, there was a sort of attraction; I responded to it—with all the strong, fine need of truth you gave me. It is this need of truth which brings me to you this evening.
"Take it, take it before giving it back to me. Don't let us ask whether it is more painful for you who receive it than for me who bestow it. Let us forget that man retains the proud authority of the male in his flesh and says "possess" as of a thing. Don't let us ask whether the union between man and woman is sublime to this degree. Let ours take that stand. One always has the time to suffer in, but there is only one time in which to love in truth.