“Our lips have met, a fragrance above the honeysuckle and the roses of the hedge.
“Our lips have met, our breasts have asked us too, why should not they repose on one another. Our hands have known each other’s sides, and flanks have questioned why they also might not have the soft contact.
“Why should not all the remotest parts of us clamor to share in this meeting of two lovers’ lips? Each of us is whole and every part fired to yearn for what every other part feels.
“I look into your eyes and see the world. All that invites to do and feel and learn. There’s not a drop of blood within my veins that does not hurry on its joyous course, to tell the uttermost confines of me, that here in you I find a counterpart, for every region of my living self.
“We cannot part for hours. This sandy shore, warm with an August sun, shall be our couch, remote from interruption. You are mine and I am yours for now and evermore. Not till I know you all, and you feel me pervading all the regions of your soul, shall we be able then to take anew the threads of our existence in the world and weave with them a common robe for both in which enclosed we act toward our fellows, a single person binary in form.”
“My breathing now is calm like yours; our blood is throbbing softly in our veins, we two went through a fire together, keen, that welded our two spirits into one—inseparable, self-contained, at rest.
“Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the other’s eyes beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not yet by us slow tasted, is to look and see how we can make them also feel the deep-down inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of their own being too, without which we should lack companionship, and feel ourselves unique and lonely. Thus, by throwing this same brilliant light of life with which we have ourselves been newly filled, about us, we can see what ne’er before we saw back in the times when naught we knew of this glad melting each in other’s soul here on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and gravel mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and penetration of each other’s heart. Now we are whole that fragments were before.”
§ 82
The rationalistic thought may occur to some men that a woman’s all can be taken at one love episode. It may come from her uttering words to the effect that she is all his. If his means with his destructive mark on it she is utterly his, to be sure, if he has ruined her. But by a perfect love episode one can ruin only the egoistic-social value of this woman for some other man. For any other man her sexual value would be only increased by the proper kind of love episode.