She glanced up with a species of pained pleasure.
‘You never used to feel like that!’ she said, and there was keen self-reproach in her voice. ‘You were once so devoted to your science that the thought of an intruder into your temple would have driven you wild. Now you don’t care; and who is to blame? Ah, not you, not you!’
The animal ambled on with her, and he, leaning on the side of the little vehicle, kept her company.
‘Well, don’t let us think of that,’ he said. ‘I offer myself and all my energies, frankly and entirely, to you, my dear, dear lady, whose I shall be always! But my words in telling you this will only injure my meaning instead of emphasize it. In expressing, even to myself, my thoughts of you, I find that I fall into phrases which, as a critic, I should hitherto have heartily despised for their commonness. What’s the use of saying, for instance, as I have just said, that I give myself entirely to you, and shall be yours always,—that you have my devotion, my highest homage? Those words have been used so frequently in a flippant manner that honest use of them is not distinguishable from the unreal.’ He turned to her, and added, smiling, ‘Your eyes are to be my stars for the future.’
‘Yes, I know it,—I know it, and all you would say! I dreaded even while I hoped for this, my dear young friend,’ she replied, her eyes being full of tears. ‘I am injuring you; who knows that I am not ruining your future,—I who ought to know better? Nothing can come of this, nothing must,—and I am only wasting your time. Why have I drawn you off from a grand celestial study to study poor lonely me? Say you will never despise me, when you get older, for this episode in our lives. But you will,—I know you will! All men do, when they have been attracted in their unsuspecting youth, as I have attracted you. I ought to have kept my resolve.’
‘What was that?’
‘To bear anything rather than draw you from your high purpose; to be like the noble citizen of old Greece, who, attending a sacrifice, let himself be burnt to the bone by a coal that jumped into his sleeve rather than disturb the sacred ceremony.’
‘But can I not study and love both?’
‘I hope so,—I earnestly hope so. But you’ll be the first if you do, and I am the responsible one if you do not.’
‘You speak as if I were quite a child, and you immensely older. Why, how old do you think I am? I am twenty.’