“All this. A girl like you—a wonderful, splendid, marvellous girl like you can’t possibly love”—the word seemed to hold all the magic of all the magicians, and he repeated it dazedly—“love—love—can’t possibly love a fellow like me.” He paused, finding the wonder of the thing oppressive. “It—it doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, a fellow—a man—a fellow—oh, I don’t know.”
Kay chuckled. It came upon Sam with an overwhelming sense of personal loss that she was smiling and that he could not see that smile. Other, future smiles he would see, but not that particular one, and it seemed to him that he would never be able to make up for having missed it.
“Would you like to to know something, Sam?”
“What?”
“Well, if you’ll listen, I’ll explain exactly how I feel. Have you ever had a very exciting book taken away from you just when you were in the middle of it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, I have. It was at Midways, when I was nine. I had borrowed it from the page boy, who was a great friend of mine, and it was about a man called Cincinnati Kit, who went round most of the time in a mask, with lots of revolvers. I had just got half-way in it when my governess caught me and I was sent to bed and the book was burned. So I never found out what happened in the little room with the steel walls behind the bar at the Blue Gulch Saloon. I didn’t get over the disappointment for years. Well, when you told me you were going away, I suddenly realised that this awful thing was on the point of happening to me again, and this time I knew I would never get over it. It suddenly flashed upon me that there was absolutely nothing worth while in life except to be with you and watch you and wonder what perfectly mad thing you would be up to next. Would Aunt Ysobel say that that was love?”
“She would,” said Sam with conviction.