s. I had to protect her first, and think of my own
attitude afterward.

"She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew
inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you're
in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.

"'You think I'm beside myself--raving? (You're not thinking of yourself,
I know.) I'm not: I never was saner. Since I've known you I've often
thought this might happen. This thing between us isn't an ordinary
thing. If it had been we shouldn't, all these months, have drifted. We
should have wanted to skip to the last page--and then throw down the
book. We shouldn't have felt we could _trust_ the future as we did. We
were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn't get tired; and when two
people feel that about each other they must live together--or part. I
don't see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won't
answer. It's the high seas--or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And
I'm for the high seas, my dear!'

"Think of sitting here--here, in this room, in this chair--and listening
to that, and seeing the tight on her hair, and hearing the sound of her
voice! I don't suppose there ever was a scene just like it....

"She was astounding--inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance
I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white
heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel
arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a
woman pleading for her life....

"Her life: that was the thing at stake! She couldn't do with less of it
than she was capable of; and a woman's life is inextricably part of the
man's she cares for.

"That was why, she argued, she couldn't accept the usual solution:
couldn't enter into the only relation that society tolerates between
people situated like ourselves. Yes: she knew all the arguments on
_that_ side: didn't I suppose she'd been over them and over them? She
knew (for hadn't she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman
who, by throwing in her lot with her lover's, binds him to a lifelong
duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh,
she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to
consider the other--the side of the man and woman who love each other
deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not
diminished, by their love. What, in such a case--she reasoned--must be
t