"You mean, it will go down the ages?"
She nodded.
"And you don't want it to go?"
"Not unless his goes too, and goes farther."
"You need hardly be afraid."
"I'm not afraid. Only, he has always stood alone, so high that no one has touched him. I've always seen him that way, all my life—and I can't bear to see him any other way. I can't bear any one to touch him, or even to come anywhere near him."
"No one ever will touch him. Whoever comes after him, he will always stand alone. And," he added gently, "you will always see him so."
"Yes," she said, but in a voice that told him she was still unconsoled. "If I had seen him when he was young, I suppose I should always see him young. Not that I care about that so much. His youth is the part of him that interests me least; perhaps because it was never in any way a part of me."
He looked at her. Did she realize how far Fielding's youth, if report spoke truly, had belonged to, or in her own words, "been a part of" other women? Did she resent their part in him? He thought not. It was not so much that she was jealous of Fielding's youth, as that she shrank from any appearance of disloyalty to his age.
"And yet," she said, "I feel that no one has a right to be young when he is old. I hate young poets because they are young. I hate my own youth—"