She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked into her eyes.
“You are not always happy, too?” he asked.
“No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.”
“You have a trouble?”
“Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I could cure it.”
He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they pray, and said falteringly, “If I own all the world, I give him you.”
Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.
“Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already.”
She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third—— Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: “I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny.”
This woman, on a windmill tower at the world’s end with a giant barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.