4
It was a whirlwind fortnight at Hankow. Romney was game, rather big game, for a questing beauty a-wing around the world. His soul had been asleep to her kind of magic. She touched him awake. His education and many attitudes towards life were torn down and rebuilt. There was a furious lover in the man, and serious weaknesses that had never been tested before. Though he did not acknowledge, and perhaps was not aware of the fact, he had been in his own way a terrific worker. The passions of his life, in a single day, had been turned from his tasks to Moira Kelvin. She had to be a rather splendid creature to take gracefully the full tumult from such a man's heart, but this was her genius.
Romney's woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive.
She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought to bear upon a man to make him greater, to make him surpass himself, than an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest force, and still have an aching void to spare.
Moira Kelvin was thirty years old, in full bloom, trusting nothing under the sun but her own heart. Whether it was mania or the excellence of her evolution, her conviction remained upstanding that there was one man somewhere who could fully awaken her. She was without laws and without fears, but she would have considered it the most vulgar form of failure to give herself to a man who called her only in part. She was in the height of her power, and modern enough to wish to know a man well before she revealed to him more than the usual arts of woman. Her one great mistake had been made at the end of girlhood in the case of the tiger-hunter. She held her body and her beauty even more sacred now because of that failure. Yet she looked into the faces of men everywhere. Any man brave enough could have his chance. Romney made the most of his.
For hours on their last day together Romney could not speak. He looked long into her face from time to time—until it turned into a mist before his eyes, or other shadowy faces passed before it. He could see nothing beyond her but his own death, and he knew enough to realise there could not be much help in that, considering his present frame of mind.... They were at Longstruth's, a sultry evening. She was tender and tyrannical in turn.
"... We are not enemies," she said. "I have been no more to you than you have called. I know you are not holding that ancient balderdash that I lured you on. I have never from the first day kept from you my conviction that the one had not been found in Sir Romney. And yet you were more to me than I thought at first. Why not take the full honour of that now?"
"You are going away," he said dully.
"It is a mercy to you—though I am not merciful. If you were a fool, like most men, you would think me a devil."
"I suppose men who are not big enough to make good with a woman—call her a devil—"