It was a new departure for Anne so openly to abet her mother, and it wounded him.
"Won't you sit down again?" said Anne, meeting his eyes firmly. "I wish to speak to you."
He sat down awkwardly. He was always awkward in her presence. Perhaps it was only a moment, but it seemed to him an hour while she kept silence.
The same voice sang across the starlit dark:
"Some souls have quickened, eye to eye,
And heart to heart, and hand in hand;
The swift fire leaps, and instantly
They understand."
Neither heard it. Nearer than the song, close between them some mighty enfolding presence seemed to have withdrawn them into itself. There is a moment when Love leaves the two hearts in which He dwells, and stands between them revealed.
So far it has been man and woman and Love—three persons met painfully together, who cannot walk together, not being agreed. But the hour comes when in awe the man and woman perceive, what was always so from the beginning, that they twain are but one being, one foolish creature who, in a great blindness, thought it was two, mistook itself for two.
Perhaps that moment of discovery of our real identity in another is the first lowest rung of the steep ladder of love. Does God, who flung down to us that nearest empty highway to Himself, does He wonder why so few travellers come up by it; why we go wearily round by such bitter sin-bogged, sorrow-smirched by-paths, to reach Him at last?
There may be much love without that sense of oneness, but when it comes it can only come to two, it can only be born of a mutual love. Neither can feel it without the other. Anne knew that. By her love for him she knew he loved her. He was slower, more obtuse; yet even he, with his limited perceptions and calculating mind, even he nearly believed, nearly had faith, nearly asked her if she could love him.
But the old self came to his perdition, the strong, shrewd, iron-willed self that had made him what he was, that had taught him to trust few, to follow his own judgment, that in his strenuous life had furnished him with certain dogged conventional ready-made convictions regarding women. Men he could judge, and did judge. He knew who would cheat him, who would fail him at a pinch, whom he could rely on. But of women he knew little. He regarded them as apart from himself, and did not judge them individually, but collectively. He knew how one of Anne's sisters, possibly more than one of them, had been coerced into marriage. He did not see that Anne belonged to a different class of being. His shrewdness, his bitter knowledge of the seamy side of a society to which he did not naturally belong, its uncouth passion for money, blinded him.