“Not alone that,” I said. “Not alone that. Least of all that, dear Mildred. Everything is gone. I have left the world. I have irrevocably lost it. For a long time unknown to myself, I was preparing this. Even when last you saw me, and the time before ... that last time at your house, when Philip died ... I was, unknown to my feeble consciousness, slaying the world. And I am all alone. And it is all well lost. Not that I did not love it. But look, my darling, all of it I love, and all in it I love, has become you!”
She accepted this as no new thing ... no new wonder.
“You had become all in life that my life needed. And the rest was a husk ... to be cut ruthlessly out.”
She withdrew her hand from mine. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me in a gesture of peace so far from my turmoiled state, that my eyes hurt, spanning the abyss between us.
“All of this ... you must listen carefully, for you must understand. That is my single hope: that you will understand: and all that I am saying is the truth, weighed as a man of science weighs, beloved ... all of this was taking place in me not from the moment when I knew you, but long before. What the world promised seemed good. Faith, passion, beauty, joy, the comradeship of perfect understanding, love in peace and in its strife ... all this ... the dangers faced with more bitterness than hope, the hours when anger cleanses, the quiet ways through woods, the ceremonials of the sea, day ... night ... the secret dwelling within the body of the belovéd as in the heart of heaven: all this the world had to give, and all this I cherished and believed in. But of all this, the world as I knew it was unworthy. Every jot of it was a crass imperfection ironically giving birth to a dream. Men and women were but maimed bits of themselves. Passion and vision were shreds torn and drooping, not banners across the sky.
“So I withdrew from the world, Mildred, the world’s splendor. That was before you came. How wonderfully, though I did not know, it was for your coming!”
I could not read her smile. And yet it moved me, making me defensive not for me: for her.
“I did not create for myself the image of a woman, and when I met you like a romantic confound that image with my eye’s. No, my withdrawal from the world of the world’s splendor was more terrible than that. For it was absolute. It was designless, and ruthless. It was, because it had to be. The world could not hold my desire of the world. Let the world therefore go!” ...
“Dear,” I drew closer to her, “how could I have dreamed that there would be a morrow ... the morning when I knew you ... by whose light all that had gone, all that had been dreamed, was darkness?”
What I had now to say no words of mine seemed great enough to bring. I was kneeling at her side. Again I took her hand ... again she let me.