And suddenly she spoke. She spoke in that voice that was so profoundly moving without ever being sad, a little wistful perhaps and always the supreme expression of her grace. She asked as if nothing had happened:
“What are you thinking of, amigo?”
I turned about. She was lying on her side, tranquil above the smooth flow of time, again closely wrapped up in her fur, her head resting on the old-gold sofa cushion bearing like everything else in that room the decoratively enlaced letters of her monogram; her face a little pale now, with the crimson lobe of her ear under the tawny mist of her loose hair, the lips a little parted, and her glance of melted sapphire level and motionless, darkened by fatigue.
“Can I think of anything but you?” I murmured, taking a seat near the foot of the couch. “Or rather it isn’t thinking, it is more like the consciousness of you always being present in me, complete to the last hair, to the faintest shade of expression, and that not only when we are apart but when we are together, alone, as close as this. I see you now lying on this couch but that is only the insensible phantom of the real you that is in me. And it is the easier for me to feel this because that image which others see and call by your name—how am I to know that it is anything else but an enchanting mist? You have always eluded me except in one or two moments which seem still more dreamlike than the rest. Since I came into this room you have done nothing to destroy my conviction of your unreality apart from myself. You haven’t offered me your hand to touch. Is it because you suspect that apart from me you are but a mere phantom, and that you fear to put it to the test?”
One of her hands was under the fur and the other under her cheek. She made no sound. She didn’t offer to stir. She didn’t move her eyes, not even after I had added after waiting for a while,
“Just what I expected. You are a cold illusion.”
She smiled mysteriously, right away from me, straight at the fire, and that was all.
VI
I had a momentary suspicion that I had said something stupid. Her smile amongst many other things seemed to have meant that, too. And I answered it with a certain resignation:
“Well, I don’t know that you are so much mist. I remember once hanging on to you like a drowning man … But perhaps I had better not speak of this. It wasn’t so very long ago, and you may …”
“I don’t mind. Well …”
“Well, I have kept an impression of great solidity. I’ll admit that. A woman of granite.”
“A doctor once told me that I was made to last forever,” she said.
“But essentially it’s the same thing,” I went on. “Granite, too, is insensible.”
I watched her profile against the pillow and there came on her face an expression I knew well when with an indignation full of suppressed laughter she used to throw at me the word “Imbecile.” I expected it to come, but it didn’t come. I must say, though, that I was swimmy in my head and now and then had a noise as of the sea in my ears, so I might not have heard it. The woman of granite, built to last forever, continued to look at the glowing logs which made a sort of fiery ruin on the white pile of ashes. “I will tell you how it is,” I said. “When I have you before my eyes there is such a projection of my whole being towards you that I fail to see you distinctly. It was like that from the beginning. I may say that I never saw you distinctly till after we had parted and I thought you had gone from my sight forever. It was then that you took body in my imagination and that my mind seized on a definite form of you for all its adorations—for its profanations, too. Don’t imagine me grovelling in spiritual abasement before a mere image. I got a grip on you that nothing can shake now.”
“Don’t speak like this,” she said. “It’s too much for me. And there is a whole long night before us.”
“You don’t think that I dealt with you sentimentally enough perhaps? But the sentiment was there; as clear a flame as ever burned on earth from the most remote ages before that eternal thing which is in you, which is your heirloom. And is it my fault that what I had to give was real flame, and not a mystic’s incense? It is neither your fault nor mine. And now whatever we say to each other at night or in daylight, that sentiment must be taken for granted. It will be there on the day I die—when you won’t be there.”
She continued to look fixedly at the red embers; and from her lips that hardly moved came the quietest possible whisper:
