She did not deny it.
“With us, our relation flared up one day into a white flame which for you seemed merely to cast a light over your past and future, but which for me burnt into me till I—began to rave.”
Again she stroked his hand. Lines of fatigue showed in her face, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.
“For the sake of the good we had brought each other, you felt that when I,—the weaker of the two as it turned out,—collapsed, you owed it to me and to yourself to patch my life together again. You felt that we had gone into an expedition together, an intellectual expedition, and that one of us had succumbed to an emotional peril. Like a good comrade you stood by. When you had wrestled with the Angel of Death you made sure that the Angel of Life should have a fair field. When I was strong enough to realize what had made life too great a burden, you began tenderly, wisely, patiently to make me see that, even without the fulfilment of the greatest boon I had ever craved, life still held possibilities. You dug up all my old sayings, pieced together my damaged philosophy which had seemed sufficient in the days before the white flame burned my cocksure ideas to a crisp, and you made a more beautiful garment of it than I had ever succeeded in fashioning. You showed me how I could keep the fragrance of the flower without crushing the flower itself. You read me passages, God save the mark, from La Nouvelle Héloise which a few years ago I would have dismissed with a snort, but in which you made me believe. You read me one of your early poems which bore to your present wisdom the relation of a chrysalis to a winged faith and you ended by persuading me that my collapse merely marked the transition of my old chrysalis of a philosophy into something winged and courageous like yours,—a transition that cannot be accomplished without pain. . . . The patience, the love even, that you expended on me ended by making me see, as you intended it should, that this crisis, my overthrowing of my angel of selfishness, was a greater blessing than any blessing which could have grown out of a surrender on our part to the urge we both felt,—for you did feel it, too, I think . . . You led me back to my own path by quoting the lines:
In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,
Only the song of a secret bird.
Your faith in me,—a generous faith that wasn’t afraid of caresses,—was a faith in life, in human decency. And now you are extending it, on some generous impulse, to another quarter. I think I’m guessing right?”
Louise showed no wish to interrupt him, and he ventured on. “In the companionship of Keble and Miriam you see something which suggests an analogy with our relation. We had adventurousness to offer each other; they have inhibitions to share. You feel that interference on your part would deprive them of a right you have claimed yourself: their right to work out some problem of their own; just as interference in our case would have denied us a privilege of deep understanding and sacrifice.”