He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had brought them together. Amid the dæmonic triumph and jubilation of the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman, had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged them in and hid them from each other.
"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one thing that sticks between us—the eternal difference in our points of view."
"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman——"
"Inhuman?"
"Well, not a bit like a woman."
"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."
"There's something about you——"
"Really? What is it, do you think?"
"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say, and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you——"
"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about you. I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me sure."