He laughed again as if he were half ashamed of his own feeling.
“Is that true, Robin?”
The sound of her voice told him that he need not be afraid to be passionate.
“Sit down here,” he said.
They had reached an old stone bench at the end of the garden where the woods began. Two cypresses towered behind it, sad-looking sentinels. There was a gap in the wall here through which the lake could be seen as one sat upon the bench.
“I want to make you understand, to make you trust me.”
She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.
“Viola,” he said, “there are many men who love only what they can see, and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman’s body. For them the woman’s body is the woman. I put it rather brutally. What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their arms is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable woman, the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive, who may be unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in the body that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal. These men love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love the spirit. They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit, but to them the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out their arms to that. The hearth can’t satisfy them. They demand the fire. The fire, the fire!” he repeated, as if the word warmed him. “I’ve so often thought of this, imagined this. It’s as if I’d actually foreseen it.”
He spoke with gathering excitement.
“What?” she murmured.