“Have you ceased to love wildness already?”
“No,” he answered truthfully. “But there is something there which makes me feel as if it were almost vulgar.”
“No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful—beautiful, even. It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midst of the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkest clouds. Do you ever read William Watson?”
“I have read some of his poems.”
“There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. ‘Pass, thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to stay—‘”
She stopped and held her fan a little higher.
“I don’t know it,” he said.
“It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know when to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away.”
“But if the heart wants to remain?”
“Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that. And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old wildness—that must give youth nausea of the soul.”