“And perhaps when I got there I might find he had set up a harem of Turkistan women.”
“You might.”
“Or that he had long since left for America.”
“Just so.”
“Or that he did not want me.”
“All these things are possible.”
The owl began to call through the dusk, and, not far away, somewhere in the square a gentle lady owl’s voice answered him.
“There are things,” said Essie, “which one can measure, and it is easy to know how to act about them, and whether it is worth while to act at all. Most things one can measure, but there are in life just a few things, a very few, which one cannot measure, or put a value on, or pay a certain price for, and no more, because they are on a plane where foot-rules and weighing machines and money do not exist. Love is one of these things. When we begin to weigh how much we will give to love, what we are willing to sacrifice for it, we are trying to drag it down to a mercantile basis and to lay it on the table of the money changers on which things are bought and sold, and bartered and equivalent value given.”
“You think I don’t love him,” I said, cut to the quick.