"A man's thought, that!" he reflected, surprised by the piercing insight, the triumphant answer of the spirit to the backward dragging surge of circumstance. "A woman suffers—always more than a man."
Margaret, flinging up her head to the dark heaven, the deep guttural note of the sea in her ears, chanted low, "Some pain is tonic…. Though to-night we are together, one and undivided—for the last time, the last time," she whispered, "yet I cannot feel the pain."
The man rebelled:—
"The last time? … But we are not ready, Margaret,—not yet!"
"We should never be ready!"
"We have had so little."
"Yes! So little—oh, so little of all the splendid chance of living."
The same thought lay between them. They had come but to the edge of experience, and beyond lay the vision of recreated life. Like souls that touched the confines of a new existence and turned back, so must they turn back to earth. So little! A few hours of meeting, a few spoken words, a few caresses, a few moments like this of mute understanding, out of all conscious time, and then nothing,—the blank!
There was something cowardly, thus to turn back at the edge of experience, incomplete and wistfully desirous. Yet the man would not ask her to venture on. What the woman would gladly give, he would not take as sacrifice. She understood.
"Would it be easier?" she asked slowly, "if for a time we had all?"