"I'll tell you," he began, resting his head on his hands. He had suffered too much by our separation; he had realized this forcibly again just now when he entered my home where everything dispossessed him; he could no longer live without me, so far away; he needed me all the time, every minute. Oh, he knew there was something irrational in his entreaty, but all he had was plain common sense. "Listen to me," he said, "there's an instinct, an instinct stronger ... but you don't understand ... there ... I've told you everything ... that's all."
He began again. His expostulations breathed an awful storm; while an icy clearness and a terrible calm rose in me. Fear crept into me down to the very marrow of my bones. What could I say to a man who suddenly talked another language? All I had was the words we used to....
"Answer me, I beg of you, answer me, even if it is no, but answer me...."
Did I have to begin all over again—give everything and explain everything all over again? Until then I had been carried along on the sustaining bosom of a powerful stream. Now a torrent furiously discharged its troubled waters and infernal foam into the even flow, and I had to fight my way back up against the current in a desperate life-and-death struggle.
So it seems that the bonds of flesh make mock of you; instead of uniting, they detach, leaving each of you to wrestle and paralyze the other's limbs like entangling undergrowth.
And does it seem that the bonds of the spirit are not strong enough because they always lack some link or word or look?
If it were not that I had found complete harmony with another human being, I should have doubted whether a man and a woman could ever love, that is, ever understand each other.
The thought inspired me with supreme strength. A hot wave kissed my mouth and ears; I pushed him away.
His wife. She was the first consideration. Remembering her gentleness, I spoke of her gently.
To be with me he could give up twenty years of his life in common, twenty years of attentions and indulgences, twenty deeply rooted years. She was a frail loving woman who had once been beautiful; she was nearly forty, which in a woman is to have no age.... Wouldn't my presence, consequently, result in hurting another woman?... And would I do such a thing, I who brought so much warmth of feeling and enthusiasm to what was beautiful, right, and high-spirited?