“It is I that am the fool, not you,” said Senhouse. “I do want her. I want nothing else in earth or heaven. And yet I know that I have her for ever. Our souls have touched each other. She is mine and I am hers. And yet I want her.”
“Won't you get her? Don't you believe that you will?”
“God knows! God knows!”
“She was beautiful?”
“The dawn,” said Senhouse, “was not more purely lovely than she. The dawn was in her face—the awfulness of it as well as its breathless beauty.”
“My mistress,” said the young man, “had the gait of a goddess in the corn. One thought of Demeter in the wheat. She was like ivory under the moon. She laughed rarely, but her voice was low and thrilled.”
“Her breath,” Senhouse continued, “was like the scent of bean-flowers. She sweetened the earth. It is true that she laughed seldom, but when she did the sun shone from behind a cloud. When she was silent you could hear her heart beat. She was deliberate, measured in all that she did—yet her spirit was as swift as the south-west wind. She did nothing that was not lovely, and never faltered in what she purposed. When first I came to know her and see the workings of her noble mind, I was so happy in the mere thought of her that I sang all day as I worked or walked. It never entered me for one minute that I could desire anything but the knowledge of her.”
“I wanted my mistress altogether,” the other broke in, “from the first moment to the last—fool, and wicked fool, as you may think me. I could see her bosom stir her gown—I could see the lines of her as she walked. She was kind to me, I tell you, and there were times when—alone with her—in her melting mood—in the wildness of my passion—but no! something held me: I never dared touch her.... And then he—the other—came back; he, with his 'claims' and 'rights'; and the thought of him, and what he could do—and did do—made me blind. You tell me that I sinned against her—”
“I don't,” said Senhouse. “I tell you that you sinned against love. You don't know what love is.”
“You say so. Maybe you know nothing about it. If you have reduced yourself to be contented with the soul of a woman, I have not. What have I to do with the soul?”