Page:Night and Day (1919).pdf/309

 “It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance,” she hazarded.

“Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is”

“Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be” she hesitated.

“Have you no personal experience of it?” he asked, letting his eyes rest upon her swiftly for a moment.

“I believe it’s influenced me enormously,” she said, in the tone of one absorbed by the possibilities of some view just presented to them; “but in my life there’s so little scope for it,” she added. She reviewed her daily task, the perpetual demands upon her for good sense, self-control, and accuracy in a house containing a romantic mother. Ah, but her romance wasn’t that romance. It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in colour, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.

“But isn’t it curious,” William resumed, “that you should neither feel it for me, not I for you?”

Katharine agreed that it was curious—very; but even more curious to her was the fact that she was discussing the question with William. It revealed possibilities which opened a prospect of a new relationship altogether. Somehow it seemed to her that he was helping her to understand what she had never understood; and in her gratitude she was conscious of a most sisterly desire to help him, too—sisterly, save for one pang, not quite to be subdued, that for him she was without romance.

“I think you might be very happy with some one you loved in that way,” she said.

“You assume that romance survives a closer knowledge of the person one loves?”

He asked the question formally, to protect himself from the sort of personality which he dreaded. The