Page:Hare and Tortoise (1925).pdf/101

 taurean and matadorean antics of two of the most ruthlessly agile products of the age.

"Louise is for the moment (and you can only define her momentarily) an interpreting link between Dare (twenty-first century) and me (nineteenth). Her original association with me awakened her consciousness to a delicate scale of weights and measures in matters of taste and opinion. When she had acquired my acuteness of perception she discovered that she was naturally endowed with Alpine talents that made my hilltop look like a mound. From her easy victories over Miriam and me she concluded that there were endless enterprises awaiting her. When she was alone she began to feel herself operating on a higher gear, making for herself new speed records. Now that I look back, I know that my cautiousness, in more than one crisis, gave her ample excuse for going her own gait. I have it from her lips that she has kept her love (whatever we mean by that enormously capacious word) for me brightly burning, as I, in all the welter, have done. Her religious nature, for want of a cult, has always centered round an exquisite instinct which I suspect to be a sort of sublimated eroticism: something that I suppose no man ever understands,—or would some other man? That's the devilish puzzle of it. Yet almost without being aware of it she seems to have kindled new fires before an altar so much more important and all-embodying than her feeling for me or mere anybody else that the light of her little lamp