bouts. You keep on coming truer,
after you have seemed to come altogether true. You... brick!"

Part 10

"To think," he cried, "you are ten years younger than I!... There are
times when you make me feel a little thing at your feet--a young, silly,
protected thing. Do you know, Ann Veronica, it is all a lie about your
birth certificate; a forgery--and fooling at that. You are one of the
Immortals. Immortal! You were in the beginning, and all the men in the
world who have known what love is have worshipped at your feet. You have
converted me to--Lester Ward! You are my dear friend, you are a slip of
a girl, but there are moments when my head has been on your breast, when
your heart has been beating close to my ears, when I have known you for
the goddess, when I have wished myself your slave, when I have wished
that you could kill me for the joy of being killed by you. You are the
High Priestess of Life...."

"Your priestess," whispered Ann Veronica, softly. "A silly little
priestess who knew nothing of life at all until she came to you."

Part 11

They sat for a time without speaking a word, in an enormous shining
globe of mutual satisfaction.

"Well," said Capes, at length, "we've to go down, Ann Veronica. Life
waits for us."

He stood up and waited for her to move.

"Gods!" cried Ann Veronica, and kept him standing. "And to think that
it's not a full year ago since I was a black-hearted rebel school-girl,
distressed, puzzled, perplexed, not understanding that this great
force of love was bursting its way through me! All those nameless
discontents--they were no more than love's birth-pangs. I felt--I
felt living in a masked world. I felt as though I had bandaged eyes. I
felt--wrapped in thick cobwebs. They blinded me. They got in my mouth.
And now--Dear! Dear! The dayspring from on high hath visited me. I love.
I am loved. I want to shout! I want to sing! I am glad! I am glad to be
alive because you are alive! I am glad to be a woman because you are a
man! I am glad! I am glad! I am glad! I thank God for life and you. I
thank God for His sunlight on your face. I thank God for the beauty
you love and the faults you love. I thank God for the very skin that is
peeling from your nose, for all things great and small that make us what
we are. This is grace I am saying! Oh! my dear! all the joy and weeping
of life are mixed in me now and all the gratitude. Never a new-born
dragon-fly that spread its wings