and for all, either justify her dominance or renounce it. But the longer they walked thus alone, the more he was disturbed by the sense of her actual presence. Her skirt blew; the feathers in her hat waved; sometimes he saw her a step or two ahead of him, or had to wait for her to catch him up.
The silence was prolonged, and at length drew her attention to him. First she was annoyed that there was no cab to free her from his company; then she recalled vaguely something that Mary had said to make her think ill of him; she could not remember what, but the recollection, combined with his masterful ways—why did he walk so fast down this side street?—made her more and more conscious of a person of marked, though disagreeable, force by her side. She stopped and, looking round her for a cab, sighted one in the distance. He was thus precipitated into speech.
‘Should you mind if we walked a little farther?’ he asked. ‘There’s something I want to say to you.’
‘Very well,’ she replied, guessing that his request had something to do with Mary Datchet.
‘It’s quieter by the river,’ he said, and instantly he crossed over. ‘I want to ask you merely this,’ he began. But he paused so long that she could see his head against the sky; the slope of his thin cheek and his large, strong nose were clearly marked against it. While he paused, words that were quite different from those he intended to use presented themselves.
‘I’ve made you my standard ever since I saw you. I’ve dreamt about you; I’ve thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only reality in the world.’
His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside him, but some one far away.
And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to you openly, I believe I shall go mad. I think of you as the most beautiful, the truest thing in the world,’ he continued, filled with a sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly become plain to him.
‘I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything. Life, I tell you, would be impossible without you. And now I want ’
She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped some material word which made sense of the rest. She could hear no more of this unintelligible rambling without checking him. She felt that she was overhearing what was meant for another.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ’You’re saying things that you don’t mean.
‘I mean every word I say,’ he replied, emphatically. He turned his head towards her. She recovered the words she was searching for while he spoke. ‘Ralph Denham is in love with you.’ They came back to her in Mary Datchet’s voice. Her anger blazed up in her.
‘I saw Mary Datchet this afternoon,’ she exclaimed.
He made a movement as if he were surprised or taken aback, but answered in a moment:
‘She told you that I had asked her to marry me, I suppose?’
‘No!’ Katharine exclaimed, in surprise.
‘I did though. It was the day I saw you at Lincoln,’ he continued. ‘I had meant to ask her to marry me, and then I looked out of the window and saw you. After that I didn’t want to ask any one to marry me. But I did it; and she knew I was lying, and refused me. I thought then, and still think, that she cares for me. I behaved very badly. I don’t defend myself.’
‘No,’ said Katharine, ‘I should hope not. There’s no defence that I can think of. If any conduct is wrong, that is.’ She spoke with an energy that was directed even more against herself than against him. ‘It seems to me,’ she continued, with the same energy, ‘that people are bound to be honest. There’s no excuse for such behaviour.’ She could now see plainly before her eyes the expression on Mary Datchet’s face.
After a short pause, he said:
‘I am not telling you that I am in love with you. I am not in love with you.’
‘I didn’t think that,’ she replied, conscious of some bewilderment.
‘I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean,’ he added.
‘Tell me then what it is that you mean,’ she said at length.
As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing water.
‘You say that we’ve got to be honest,’ Ralph began. ‘Very well. I will try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you’ll think me mad. It’s a fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago I have made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I’m almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I’ve gone to. It’s become the thing that matters most in my life.’ He checked himself. ‘Without knowing you, except that you’re beautiful, and all that, I’ve come to believe that we’re in some sort of agreement; that we’re after something together; that we see something ... I’ve got into the habit of imagining you; I’m always thinking what you’d say or do; I walk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It’s merely a bad habit, a school-boy habit, day-dreaming; it’s a common experience ; half one’s friends do the same; well, those are the facts.’
Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.
‘If you were to know me you would feel none of this,’ she said. ‘We don’t know each other—we’ve always been-interrupted ... Were you going to tell me this that day my aunts came?’ she asked, recollecting the whole scene.
He bowed his head.
‘The day you told me of your engagement,’ he said.
She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.
‘I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you,’ he went on. ‘I should feel it more reasonably-that’s all. I shouldn’t talk the kind of nonsense I’ve talked to-night ... But it wasn’t nonsense. It was the truth,’ he said doggedly. ‘It’s the important thing. You can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all
