"I must not lose anything!" I said, and my voice sank lower,—"I cannot bear—to lose YOU!"
His hand closed on mine with a tighter grasp.
"Yet you doubt!" he said, softly.
"I must KNOW!" I said, resolutely.
He lifted his head with a proud gesture that was curiously familiar to me.
"So the old spirit is not dead in you, my queen," he said, smiling. "The old indomitable will!—the desire to probe to the very centre of things! Yet love defies analysis,—and is the only thing that binds the Universe together. A fact beyond all proving—a truth which cannot be expounded by any given rule or line but which is the most emphatic force of life! My queen, it is a force that must either bend or break you!"
I made no reply. He still held my hand, and we looked out together on the shining expanse of the sea where there was no vessel visible and where our schooner alone flew over the watery, moonlit surface like a winged flame.
"In your working life," he continued, gently, "you have done much. You have thought clearly, and you have not been frightened away from any eternal fact by the difficulties of research. But in your living life you have missed more than you will care to know. You have been content to remain a passive recipient of influences—you have not thoroughly learned how to combine and use them. You have overcome altogether what are generally the chief obstacles in the way of a woman's higher progress,—her inherent childishness—her delight in imagining herself wronged or neglected,—her absurd way of attaching weighty importance to the merest trifles—her want of balance, and the foolish resentment she feels at being told any of her faults,—this is all past in you, and you stand free of the shackles of sheer stupidity which makes so many women impossible to deal with from a man's standpoint, and which renders it almost necessary for men to estimate them at a low intellectual standard. For even in the supreme passion of love, millions of women are only capable of understanding its merely physical side, while the union of soul with soul is never consummated:
Where is that love supreme
In which souls meet? Where is it satisfied?
En-isled on heaving sands
Of lone desire, spirit to spirit cries,
While float across the skies
Bright phantoms of fair lands,
Where fancies fade not and where dreams abide."
His voice dropped to the softest musical cadence, and I looked up. He answered my look.