I stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the steel-gray eyes!—and they had a look in them. The long, bitter pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming together of these was like the joining of two halves.
I do not know which brings me the deeper pain—the loneliness and weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes to the world’s end. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are like the pale, beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of earth and sky that come together in the dark.
“Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?”
“You know so much—so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that. The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so, then, you must understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest of them. And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you happier than you are.”
“I am not happy at all,” said the man-devil. “I am merely contented.”
“Contentment,” I said, “in place of Happiness, is a horrid feeling. Not one of your countless advocates loves you. They all serve you faithfully and well, but with it all they hate you. Always people hate their tyrant. You are my tyrant, but I love you absorbingly, madly. Happiness for me would be to live with you and see you made happy by the overwhelming flood of my love.”
“It interests me,” he said. “You are a most interesting feminine philosopher—and your philosophy is after my own heart, in its lack of virtue. It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait.”
“Indeed, I am not,” I replied. “Intellectual people are detestable. They have pale faces and bad stomachs and bad livers, and if they are women their corsets are sure to be too tight, and probably black, and if they are men they are soft, which is worse. And they never by any chance know what it means to walk all day in the rain, or to roll around on the ground in the dirt. And, above all, they never fall in love with the Devil.”
“They are tiresome,” the Devil agreed. “If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?”