But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.'
'I don't trust you when you drag in the stars,' she said. 'If you were quite true, it wouldn't be necessary to be so far-fetched.'
'Don't trust me then,' he said, angry. 'It is enough that I trust myself.'
'And that is where you make another mistake,' she replied. 'You DON'T trust yourself.
You don't fully believe yourself what you are saying.
You don't really want this conjunction, otherwise you wouldn't talk so much about it, you'd get it.'
He was suspended for a moment, arrested.
'How?' he said.
'By just loving,' she retorted in defiance.
He was still a moment, in anger.
Then he said:
'I tell you, I don't believe in love like that.
I tell you, you want love to administer to your egoism, to subserve you.
Love is a process of subservience with you—and with everybody.
I hate it.'
'No,' she cried, pressing back her head like a cobra, her eyes flashing. 'It is a process of pride—I want to be proud—'
'Proud and subservient, proud and subservient, I know you,' he retorted dryly. 'Proud and subservient, then subservient to the proud—I know you and your love.
It is a tick-tack, tick-tack, a dance of opposites.'
'Are you sure?' she mocked wickedly, 'what my love is?'
'Yes, I am,' he retorted.
'So cocksure!' she said. 'How can anybody ever be right, who is so cocksure?
It shows you are wrong.'
He was silent in chagrin.
They had talked and struggled till they were both wearied out.
'Tell me about yourself and your people,' he said.
And she told him about the Brangwens, and about her mother, and about Skrebensky, her first love, and about her later experiences.
He sat very still, watching her as she talked.
And he seemed to listen with reverence.
Her face was beautiful and full of baffled light as she told him all the things that had hurt her or perplexed her so deeply.
He seemed to warm and comfort his soul at the beautiful light of her nature.
'If she REALLY could pledge herself,' he thought to himself, with passionate insistence but hardly any hope.
Yet a curious little irresponsible laughter appeared in his heart.
'We have all suffered so much,' he mocked, ironically.
She looked up at him, and a flash of wild gaiety went over her face, a strange flash of yellow light coming from her eyes.
'Haven't we!' she cried, in a high, reckless cry. 'It is almost absurd, isn't it?'
'Quite absurd,' he said. 'Suffering bores me, any more.'
'So it does me.'
He was almost afraid of the mocking recklessness of her splendid face.
Here was one who would go to the whole lengths of heaven or hell, whichever she had to go.
And he mistrusted her, he was afraid of a woman capable of such abandon, such dangerous thoroughness of destructivity.
Yet he chuckled within himself also.
She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, looking down at him with strange golden-lighted eyes, very tender, but with a curious devilish look lurking underneath.
'Say you love me, say "my love" to me,' she pleaded
He looked back into her eyes, and saw.
His face flickered with sardonic comprehension.
'I love you right enough,' he said, grimly. 'But I want it to be something else.'
'But why?
But why?' she insisted, bending her wonderful luminous face to him. 'Why isn't it enough?'
'Because we can go one better,' he said, putting his arms round her.
'No, we can't,' she said, in a strong, voluptuous voice of yielding. 'We can only love each other.