Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/140

 beauty. But when I saw you again, it seemed to me at first that my eyes deceived me. My memories were so fair and so fond—but they had been too slow and too timid—they had not dared to give you all the splendor which appeared so suddenly to dazzle me. I was as a man that recalled to mind a flower he had but seen in passing through a garden on a gray day, and should be suddenly confronted with a hundred thousand as fair in a field bathed with sunshine. I saw once more your hair, your brow, your eyes, and I found all the soul of the face I had adored—but how its beauty shames that which I had treasured in silence through endless days, through years whose only light was a memory that had taken too long a road and found itself outshone by the reality! . . . Ah! I knew not too well what I meant to do. I felt that I was lost — and I desired to drag with me all I could. . . . And I hated you, because of the love. . . . Yes, I should have gone to the end had it not been you. . . . Yet any other would have seemed odious to me-you yourself would have had to be other than you are. . . . I lose my reason when I think of it. . . . One word would have been enough that was different from your words-one gesture that was not yours—the slightest thing would have inflamed my hate and let loose the monster. But when I saw you, I saw in that same moment that it was impossible. Vanna. I felt a change, too. . . . I marveled that I could speak to, you as I have spoken since the first moment. . . . I am silent by nature -I have never spoken thus to any man, unless it be to Marco, Guido's father. . . . And even with him it is not the same. He <!—