n an
amusing but futile game. Do you realize that we do not know each other
very well? I sometimes wonder if you know me at all. From the time I
fell in love with you until you promised to marry me, I was at one sort
of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No
writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is
several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires--that
hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an
imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal
himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you--sporadic
is the word, for between my work and your friends, we have had little
time together--and I don't think I have ever taken you in my arms with
the feeling that you were the woman I loved, not merely the woman I
desired. And I believe that I love you even more than I desire you. You
are all that, but so much--so much--more."

She had fixed her startled eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.

"There has always been a lot of talk about the soul. Sentimentalists
wallow in the word, and realists deride it. What it really is I do not
pretend to know. Probably as good a word as any--and certainly a very
mellifluous word--for some obscure chemical combination of finer essence
than the obvious material part of us, that craves a foretaste of
immortality while we are still mortal. Perhaps we are descended from the
gods after all, and unless we listen when they whisper in this
unexplorable part of our being, we find only a miserable substitute for
happiness, and love turns to hate. Whatever it is that golden essence
demands, I have found it in you, and if circumstances had been different
I should have known it long ago. I know now what you meant that night
when you told me you had spent many distracted years looking for what no
man could give you, and although I doubted at that time I could even
guess what your own mysterious essence demanded, I know now--still
vaguely, for it is something as far beyond the defining power of words as
the faith of the Christian. It can never be seen, nor heard, nor
expressed, but it is there. And only once in a lifetime does any one
mortal have it to give to another. A man may love many times, but he is
a god-man only once."

He held her more closely, for she was trembling, but he continued to walk
on, guiding her automatically through the tre