“Oh,” she said, her eyes brimming, “you’re good and patient, indeed you are. I hardly understand, yet, what’s come over us, that sometimes my breath comes short and I shut my eyes and think I must faint away with the longing to see you. I wish, sometimes I wish that something would happen—something quite outside this life, I mean,—to relieve us; I don’t know what I mean, rightly. But it’s the weight ... and the longing ... I can’t keep still under it, at times; I have to get up and move about ... the longing ... the burning.” She put her hand up to her throat as though she were physically oppressed. “And I put questions to myself—about you, I mean—and the answers come springing without my having to think. They leap out, the answers do. Would I die for you? Oh, so gladly! would I starve for you? yes, and never a word to let you know. Would I die if you died? I’d pine if I lived an hour after you’d gone. Would I give myself up to you? yes—to beat me if you chose; I’d shut my eyes and let you.... That’s love, isn’t it? It’s like striking a bell; it clangs back at once. And now—I can’t help saying it—for ten days there’ll be times when we’re alone, and I’ll be less starved than I am now; it seems I’ve just been keeping alive for this, and reach it all spent and gasping. Oh, nothing, nothing more! only to talk to you, and look at you; we’re strangers still. I want to drink being with you. Then I’ll be able to think, and we’ll sort everything out, and get it clear. Only now I’m too parched for you, and too frightened of them. You must decide everything for me, and tell me what to do, and then take me away,—oh, take me away!”
She clung to him as she besought him, abandoning herself like a frightened child, and putting her arms up round his neck exactly like a child.
“My God, I didn’t know you could speak so, or feel so. I felt so, but I didn’t dare to tell you.”
“I didn’t know either ... one doesn’t know....” She had sunk so unrestrainedly against him, that but for his support she would have slipped down without resistance upon the floor. He felt that she would lie there, like a shot bird, at his feet, making no effort to rise, and letting her will glide away from her in a passive extinction of self; it would be for her the most exquisite, and at the same time the most spiritually voluptuous experience of her life. As it was, she had never known anything like the wild, fainting rapture of this half-surrender. “Linnet, Linnet,” she said, pushing him away, “where are we? it won’t do; we’re being swept along; I’m afraid. Go right over there, to the other side of the room; no, farther away than that.” She directed him with an imperious urgent finger. “You mustn’t come any nearer. Promise. Sit down on that chair. I’ll stop over here.” She leant her head back against the wall.
“Now we couldn’t well be farther apart,” he said, having obeyed her. They were both pale as they looked at one another across the width of the room, and their breath came and went quickly between their parted lips.
“It’s to be like this the whole time that Gregory is away. Then when he comes back I can tell him everything. If we had been different, I should tell him less easily.”
Morgan was just able to follow the ethics of this argument.
“Now I’m going away,” she continued; “you mustn’t move. If you moved, I should run to you....”
“Oh, Nan!” he said, stretching out his hands to her across the room.
“No, no, no,” she cried, vigorously shaking her head from side to side, the shake becoming more vigorous as her need for determination increased. “Oh, my darling heart,” she cried, “I want so to come to you,” and she fled from the room, leaving him unbalanced and perplexed, and in half a dozen minds as to whether he ought to submit as he did to her directions, or to take the law away from her by adopting a bolder course.