“I meant to tell you that I am engaged,” she observed. “Does that matter?”
“Engaged!” He found his tongue quickly enough then; and she, surprised, interested, and in nowise dissenting, listened to his eloquent views upon the matter of Mr. Frawley, whom she, during the lucid intervals of his silence, curtly described.
“Do you know,” she said with great relief, “that I always felt that way about love, because I never knew anything about it except from the symptoms of Mr. Frawley? So when they told me that love and friendship were different, I supposed it must be so, and I had no high opinion of love ... until you made it so agreeable. Now I—I prefer it to anything else.... I could sit here with you all day, listening to you. Tell me some more.”
[ XVI]
e did. She listened, sometimes intently interested, absorbed, sometimes leaning back dreamily, her eyes partly veiled under silken lashes, her mouth curved with the vaguest of smiles.
He spoke as a man who awakes with a start—not very clearly at first, then with feverish coherence, at times with recklessness almost eloquent. Still only half awakened himself, still scarcely convinced, scarcely credulous that this miracle of an hour had been wrought in him, here under the sky and setting sun and new-born leaves, he spoke not only to her
but of her to himself, formulating in words the rhythm his pulses were beating, interpreting this surging tide which thundered in his heart, clamoring out the fact—the fact—the fact that he loved!—that love was on him like the grip of Fate—on him so suddenly, so surely, so inexorably, that, stricken as he was, the clutch only amazed and numbed him.
He spoke, striving to teach himself that the incredible was credible, the impossible possible—that it was done! done! done! and that he loved a woman in an hour because, in an hour, he had read her innocence as one reads through crystal, and his eyes were opened for the first time upon loveliness unspoiled, sweetness untainted, truth uncompromised.