“It is only the Atlantic,” Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.
He shook his head. “It is not marked in any geography,” he said, and gave her a troubled smile. “How can I make it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty and charm of mere vitality—you have always been so alive. One finds a physical freedom in which one’s very soul seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to respond—”
The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his, could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.
It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man’s dignity, of man’s estate, for his own sake.
“It is a curious history,” she said. “You are right in thinking I should not find it quite easy to understand. We make those—arrangements—so much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important than they are.”
“But they are of the highest importance.” He stopped short, confounded.
“I shall try to consecrate my marriage,” he said presently, more to himself than to Advena.
Her thought told him bitterly: “I am afraid it is the only thing you can do with it,” but something else came to her lips.
“I have not congratulated you. I am not sure,” she went on, with astonishing candour, “whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all my heart. Are you happy now?”
He turned his great dark eyes on her. “I am as happy, I dare say, as I have any need to be.”