She stopped strangely. He was bending close, watching her.
“Do you know you are a love-woman?”
“You mean something different?” she asked queerly.
“I mean you are everything—don’t you see? You know everything at once that I have to get bruised and tortured to know. And when you are here, I know where I am. It’s different from any kind of resting to be here with you. It’s kind of being made over. And then you are so—tender——”
“You make the tears come, John Morning.”
Now, it was very dark where they were; the real silences began. He knew the most wonderful thing about her—her listening.... Sometimes, she seemed hardly there. Sometimes the love for her and the sweet quality of it all—shut his throat, and he stared away in the dark. It came to him that Betty Berry—left to herself—would be infallible. She might do wrong, through the will of someone else, but her own impulses were unerringly right. There was delicacy, perhaps, from the long summer alone, in this sense that he must not impose his will. She would be unable to refuse anything possible. If ever Betty Berry were forced to refuse anything he asked, they would never be the same together. And so he studied her. Her nature was like something that enfolded. It was like an atmosphere—his own element.
“Betty——”
“Yes.”
“Betty——”
“Yes——-”