“Almost any time we have an hour or two alone. We need time to get up steam, so to speak. We don’t need to swim in a mountain lake every time either. I think you got your particular thrill because you had me and my mind absolutely all to yourself.”
“Can I ever get that again?”
“Surely, dear heart, for when I saw for the first time that look in your eyes, which was not joy alone but pure fire, I learned something about you I never knew before. I realized that you yourself are a far more complex and interesting personality with infinitely more potentialities than ever I had dreamed of. Do you think now I would ever stop telling you stories like that?”
“I don’t remember a word of it except the perfect rainbow circle. The rest was silence. But it had somehow a world of meaning for me. I know we swam. I know we couldn’t fly, but you made me think we did, which is quite as good for me.”
§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we had affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of passion was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our creed of love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our marriage. We knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified ourselves in countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid identification represented in our children, but while we did it with our intellects we really did not do it with our hearts. We have not been truly united, truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external devotion and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is instantly complete in total physical and emotional fusion think everyone else is the same as they are and they don’t know what they have any more than we did not know what we did not have. A colour-blind man in a world of people all colour-blind would not suspect his affliction. Possibly it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might only laugh at the extraordinary persons who say they can see colours in things visible, just as we now consider people freaks who say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love we see now?”
“I do, for the vision of the circular rainbow on top of the cloud is something that really requires a certain fine sensitivity that is the product of civilization, and depends on the many factors of civilized life. I could not, as my remote ancestors could, carry you off your feet in a literal sense, and dominate you by sheer physical strength, which would have been the only earthbound flight possible with men of that age. Civilization has transmuted physical strength into mental, moral and spiritual strength. And just as physical strength was sensibly evident in every action and motion of the body, so now, in our present state of civilization, it is obscured or obliterated and every mental reaction to our environment is taking its place. To some women the strength of this mental reaction is invisible, and even today they can love with passion only the physically perfect man. But the majority of women now have been educated to the point of realizing that physical strength may be present in men whose mental and moral development is very small and that mental and moral strength may exist even in the men whose physique is slight and even frail.”