“And why?”
“Because I love you.”
“That seems an excellent reason, certainly,” said the Devil.
“I want to be happy for once in my life,” I said. “I have never been happy. And if I could be happy once for one gold day, I should be satisfied, and I should have that to remember in the long years.”
“And you are a strangely pathetic little animal,” said the Devil.
“I am pathetic,” I said. I clasped my hands very tightly. “I know that I am pathetic: and for this reason I am the most terribly pathetic of all in the world.”
“Poor little Mary MacLane!” said the Devil. He leaned toward me. He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane!” he said again in a voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes—the glance of the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me. It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head down and sobbed as I breathed.
“Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-devil, softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you always—harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?”
“I know—I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I felt a rush of an old thick, heavy anguish. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through the long, cold, lonely years till now—and now all the torture does not keep back the tears. There is no one—nothing—to help me bear it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young, new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere—except long, dark, lonely years behind her and before her. No one that loves me and long, long years.”