“Did your heart seem so small?” she said.
“You make everything I have and am seem small—and yet great. What does it mean?”
“That you are great, as I am, because we love. No one is small who loves. No one is poor, no one is bad, who loves. Love burns up evil. It’s the angel that destroys.”
Her words seemed to send through his whole body a quivering joy. He took her face between his hands and lifted it from his heart.
“Is that true? Is that true?” he said. “I’ve—I’ve tried to think that. If you know how I’ve tried.”
“And don’t you know it is true?”
“I don’t feel as if I knew anything that you do not tell me to-night. I don’t feel as if I have, or am, anything but what you give me, make me to-night. Can you understand that? Can you understand what you are to me? That you are everything, that I have nothing else, that I have never had anything else in all these years that I have lived and that I have forgotten? Can you understand it? You said just now ‘Speak to me, tell me all you are.’ That’s what I am, all I am, a man you have made a man. You, Domini—you have made me a man, you have created me.”
She was silent. The intensity with which he spoke, the intensity of his eyes while he was speaking, made her hear those rushing waters as if she were being swept away by them.
“And you?” he said. “You?”
“I?”