“Nothing?” he queried. “Not even love? That used to be a great matter with you!”
She laughed, coldly.
“Love is a delusion,” she said. “And no doubt I ‘used’ to think the delusion a reality. I know better now.”
He turned the helm about, and their boat began to run homeward, its lateen sail glistening like the uplifted wing of a sea-gull. Above them, the snowy Alpine range showed white as the tips of frozen waves—beneath, the water rippled blue-black, breaking now and again into streaks of silver.
“I’m afraid you have imbibed some of my cynicism,” he said, slowly. “It is, perhaps, a pity! For now, when you have come to think love a ‘delusion,’ you will be greatly loved! It is always the way! If you have nothing to give to men, it is then they clamour for everything!”
He looked at her as he spoke and saw her smile—a cruel little smile.
“You are lovely now,” he went on, “and you will be lovelier. For all I can tell, you may attain an almost maddening beauty. And a sexless beauty is like that of a goddess,—slaying its votaries as with lightning. Supposing this to be so with you, you should learn to love!—if only out of pity for those whom your indifference might destroy!”
She raised herself on her elbow and looked at him curiously. The moonlight showed his dark, inscrutable face, and the glitter of the steely eyes under the black lashes, and there was a shadow of melancholy upon his features.
“You forget!” she said—“You forget that I am old! I am not really young in the sense you expect me to be. I know myself. Deep in my brain the marks of lonely years and griefs are imprinted—of disappointed hopes, and cruelties inflicted on me for no other cause than too much love and constancy—those marks are ineffaceable! So it happens that beneath the covering of youth which your science gives me, and under the mark of this outward loveliness, I, the same Diana, live with a world’s experience, as one in prison,—knowing that whatever admiration or liking I may awaken, it is for my outward seeming, not for my real self! And you can talk of love! Love is a divinity of the soul, not of the body!”
“And how many human beings have ‘soul,’ do you think?” he queried, ironically. “Not one in ten million!”