Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/26

 "I like men of action," she at last returned. "Men who've been through something."

"And I've been through nothing—I see—but the long discipline of my choked passion for you."

She kept answering—her bold grave eyes fixed on him, counting with nothing, evading nothing—as if she had not heard him. "If it could be a man of your kind at all it would be you. There are things in you I like so. But that you should give up anything for me—that I should find quite horrible. You must become great. Intellectually," she explained as if she quoted it out of a book.

"Yes," Ralph laughed even while he sighed—"dry up to it, shrivel down to it! You must despise me to say such a thing as that to me! Why not tell me at once that you hope you may never see me again?"

"You're beautiful," she remarked without pity.

"A beautiful worm?" he asked; "a delicate classified insect? a slow-crawling library beetle, slightly iridescent, warranted compressible—that is resisting the squash—when the book is closed to on him?"

"You're beautiful," she simply repeated.

He appeared at this to take something of it in, or at any rate to make something of it out. "Why won't it just do then that one is a gentleman—and for all that not a fool?"

"Oh it does do—for being glad I know you and that you're just as you are. It's good to know 12