“I understand. All I ever read has come back to me here on the desert, as clear as the print on the page—seen so many years ago. I used to hate Sunday school when I was a boy. But now, often, words of the Bible come before my mind.... But are you telling me the whole truth? Why did you say, ‘Time—stand still here,’ when I held you in my arms?”
“What a boy you are!” she murmured, and her eyes held a gladness for the sight of him. “Confess, now, wouldn’t that moment have been a beautiful one for time to stop—for life to stand still—for the world to be naught—for thought and memory to cease?”
“Yes, it would,” he replied, “but no more beautiful than this moment while you stand there so. When you look like that you make me hope.”
“For what?” she queried, softly.
“For you.”
“Wansfell, you are the only man I’ve ever known who could have held me in his arms and have been blind and dead to the nature of a woman.... Listen. You’ve done me the honor to say I have splendid thoughts and noble emotions. I hope I have. I know you have inspired many. I know this valley of death has changed my soul.... But, Wansfell, I am a woman, and a woman is more than her high and lofty thoughts—her wandering inspirations. A woman is a creature of feeling, somehow doomed.... When I said, ‘Time—stand still here,’ I was false to the woman in me that you idealize. A thousand thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, sorrows, vanities prompted the words of which you have made me ashamed. But to spare myself a little, let me say that it would indeed be beautiful for me to have you take me up into your arms—and then for time to stand still forever.”
“Do you mean that—so—you’d feel safe, protected, at rest?” he asked, with emotion.
“Yes, and infinitely more. Wansfell it is a woman’s fate that the only safe and happy and desired place for her this side of the grave is in the arms of the man she loves. A real man—with strength and gentleness—for her and her alone!... It is a terrible thing in women, the need to be loved. As a baby I had that need—as a girl—and as a woman it became a passion. Looking back now, through the revelation that has come to me here in this valley of silence—when thought is clairvoyant and all-pervading—I can see how the need of love, the passion to be loved, is the strongest instinct in any woman. It is an instinct. She can no more change it than she can change the shape of her hand. Poor fated women! Education, freedom, career may blind them to their real nature. But it is a man, the right man, that means life to a woman. Otherwise the best in her dies.... That instinct in me—for which I confess shame—has been unsatisfied despite all the men who have loved me. When you saved me—perhaps from injury—and took me into your arms, the instinct over which I have no control flashed up. While it lasted, until you looked at me, I wanted that moment to last forever. I wanted to be held that way—in your great, strong arms—until the last trumpet sounded. I wanted you to see only me, feel only me, hold only me, live for only me, love me beyond all else on earth and in heaven!”
As she paused, her slender brown hands at her heaving breast, her eyes strained as if peering through obscurity at a distant light, Adam could only stare at her in helpless fascination. In such moods as this she taught him as much of the mystery of life as he had taught her of the nature of the desert.
“Now the instinct is gone,” she continued. “Chilled by your aloofness! I am looking at it with intelligence. And, Wansfell, I’m filled with pity for women. I pity myself, despite the fact that my mind is free. I can control my acts, if not my instincts and emotions. I am bound. I am a woman. I am a she-creature. I am little different from the fierce she-cats, the she-lions—any of the she-animals that you’ve told me fight to survive down on your wild Colorado Desert.... That seems to me the sex, the fate, the doom of women. Ah! no wonder they fight for men—spit and hiss and squall and scratch and rend! It’s a sad thing, seen from a woman’s mind. That great mass of women who cannot reason about their instincts, or understand the springs of their emotions—they are the happier. Too much knowledge is bad for my sex. Perhaps we are wrongly educated. I am the happier for what you have taught me. I can see myself now with pity instead of loathing. I am not to blame for what life has made me. There are no wicked women. They must be loved or they are lost.... My friend, the divinity in human life is seen best in some lost woman like me.”