for a long while.
The night is ours."

"I have come here to tell you that I love you," she said. "Ah, can _I_
make _you_ tremble? It was impossible for me not to tell you this; I
could not rest in my retreat without having the last word with
you, without having you know me. And I want to tell you that I have
suffered horribly; you may care to know that, for no one else in the
world could have made me, no one else ever can. Only your fingers
could twist in my heart-strings and tear my heart out of my body. I
suffered first because I doubted you, then because I loved you, then
the torture of jealousy and the pangs of parting, then those dreadful
three months when I heard no word. I could not stay at Casa Grande;
everything associated with you drove me wild. Oh, I have gone through
all varieties! But the last was the worst, after I heard from you
again, and all other causes were removed, and I knew that you were
well and still loved me: the knowledge that I never could be anything
to you,--and I could be so much! The torment of this knowledge was so
bitter that there was but one refuge,--imagination. I shut my eyes to
my little world and lived with you; and it seemed to me that I grew
into absolute knowledge of you. Let me tell you what I divined. You
may tell me that I am wrong, but I do not believe that you will. I
think that in the little time we were together I absorbed you.

"It seemed to me that your soul reached always for something just
above the attainable, restless in the moments which would satisfy
another, fretted with a perverse desire for something different when
an ardent wish was granted, steeped, under all wanton determined
enjoyment of life, with the bitter knowing of life's sure impotence
to satisfy. Could the dissatisfied darting mind loiter long enough to
give a woman more than the promise of happiness?--but never mind that.

"With this knowledge of you my own resistless desire for variety left
me: my nature concentrated into one paramount wish,--to be all things
to you. What I had felt vaguely before and stifled--the nothingness
of life, the inevitableness of satiety--I repudiated utterly, now that
they were personified in you; I would not recognize the fact of their
existence. _I_ could make you happy. How could imagination shape such
scenes, such perfection of union, of companionship, if reality were
not? Imagination is the child of inherited and living impressions. I
might exaggerate; but, even