“Because, if I had been married to you for a year I should have come to my senses and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and the voice of any other man. I cannot quite see that now. But it is all madness. You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married you, afterward it would arise and assert itself, and I should hate you always, as I do now sometimes.”
“I like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical,” he said, leaning his face upon his hand. “Go a little further in your analysis; say, ‘I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual and spiritual nature.’ I like you when you get philosophical.”
She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against her.
“You are acting foolishly, Lyndall,” he said, suddenly changing his manner, and speaking earnestly, “most foolishly. You are acting like a little child; I am surprised at you. It is all very well to have ideals and theories; but you know as well as any one can that they must not be carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child, except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more especially one without wealth, without position, and who—”
“Yes—go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to—‘who has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me on equal terms.’ Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth to one another.”
Then she added after a pause:
“I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything; and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written, imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. ‘Poor little devil!’ you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard no more of you.”
The stranger smiled.
“But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your man’s love is a child’s love for butterflies. You follow till you have the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground.”
“You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far into life,” he said.