The Coast of Bohemia

by William Dean Howells

"Oh, wait!" cried the girl. "What are you doing—— You don't know. There is something I must tell you—that will make you hate me——" She struggled to begin somehow, but she did not know where.

"No," he said. "You needn't tell me anything. There isn't anything in the world that could change me to you—nothing that you could tell me! Sometime, if you must—if you wish; but not now. I've been too miserable, and now I'm so happy."

"But it's very foolish, it's silly! I tell you——"

"Not now, not now!" He insisted. He made her cry, he made her laugh; but he would not listen to her. She knew it was all wrong, that it was romantic and fantastic, and she was afraid of it; but she was so happy too, that she could not will it for the moment to be otherwise. She put off the time that must come, or let him put it off for her, and gladly lost herself in the bliss of the present. The fear, growing more and more vague and formless, haunted her rapture, but even this ceased before they parted, and left her at perfect peace in his love—their love.

He told her how much she could be to him, how she could supplement him in every way where he was faltering and deficient, and he poured out his heart in praises of her that made her brain reel. They talked of a thousand things, touching them, and leaving them, and coming back, but always keeping within the circle of their relation to themselves. They flattered one another with the tireless and credulous egotism of love; they tried to tell what they had thought of each other from the first moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since had a thought that was not the other's; they believed this. The commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to live for the highest things.

They began this life by spending the whole afternoon together. When some other people came into the parlor, they went out to walk. They walked so long and far, that they came at last to the Park without meaning to, and sat on a bench by a rock. Other people were doing the same: nurses with baby-carriages before them; men smoking and reading; elderly husbands with their elderly wives beside them, whom they scarcely spoke to; it must have been a very common, idle thing, but to them it had the importance, the distinction of something signal, done for the first time. They staid there till it was almost dark, and then they went and had tea together in the restaurant of one of the vast hotels at the entrance of the Park. It was a very Philistine place, with rich-looking, dull-looking people, travellers and sojourners, dining about in its spacious splendor; but they got a table in a corner and were as much alone there as in the Park; their happiness seemed to push the world away from them wherever they were, and to leave them free within a wide circle of their own. She poured the tea for them both from the pot which the waiter set at her side; he looked on in joyful wonder and content. "How natural it all is," he sighed. "I should think you had always been doing that for me. But I suppose it is only from the beginning of time!"

She let him talk the most, because she was too glad to speak, and because they had both the same thoughts, and it did not need two to utter them. Now and then, he made her speak; he made her answer some question; but it was like some question that she had asked herself. From time to time they spoke of others besides themselves; of her mother and the Burtons, of Charmian, of Mrs. Westley, of Wetmore; but it was in relation to themselves; without this relation, nothing had any meaning.

When they parted after an evening prolonged till midnight in Mrs. Montgomery's parlor, that which had been quiescent in Cornelia's soul, stirred again, and she knew that she was wrong to let Ludlow go without telling him of Dickerson. It was the folly of that agreement of theirs about painting Charmian repeating itself in slightly different terms, and with vastly deeper meaning, but to a like end of passive deceit, of tacit untruth; his wish did not change it. She thought afterwards she could not have let him go without telling him, if she had not believed somehow that the parallel would complete itself, and that he would come back, as he had done before, and help her undo what was false between them; but perhaps this was not so; perhaps if she had been sure he would not come back she would not have spoken; at any rate he did not come back.

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XXXV.