For a second, lightly, she rested her warm, fresh cheek against his.
When it was burning she disengaged her fingers from his and leaned
aside against the rain-swept window.
"You see?" she said calmly but with heightened colour.... "I am very
human after all.... But it is still my mind that rules, not my
emotions."
She turned to him in her old sweetly humorous and mocking manner: "That is all the romance of which I am capable, Clive--if there be any
real romance in a very clear mind. For it is my intellect that must
lead me to salvation or to destruction. If I am to come crashing down
at your feet, I shall have already planned the fall. If I am to be
destroyed, it will not be by any accident of romantic emotion, of
unconsidered impulse, or sudden blindness of passion; it will be
because my intelligence coolly courted destruction, and accepted
every chance, every hazard."
So spoke Athalie, smiling, in the full confidence and pride of her
superb youth, certain of the mind's autocracy over matter, lightly
defying within herself the latent tempest, of which she as yet divined
no more than the first exquisitely disturbing breeze;--deriding, too,
the as yet unloosened bolts of the old gods themselves,--the white
lightning of desire.
"Come," she said, half mockingly, half seriously, passing her arm
through Clive's;--"we are quite safe together in this safe and sane
old world--unless I choose--otherwise."
She turned and touched her lips lightly to his hair: "So you may safely behave as irrationally, irresponsibly, and
romantically as you choose.... As long as I now am wide awake."
And then, for the first time, he realised his utter responsibility to
this girl who so gaily and audaciously relieved him of it. And he
understood how pitifully unarmed she really stood, and how imminent
the necessity for him to forge for himself the armour of character,
and to wear it eternally for his own safety as well as hers.
"Good night, dear," he said.
In her new and magnificent self-confidence she turned and put both
arms around his neck, drawing his lips against hers.
But after he had gone she leaned against the closed door, less
confident, her heart beating too fast and hard to entirely justify
this new enfranchisement of the body, or her overwhelming faith in
its wise and trusted guardian, the mind.
And he went soberly on his way through the rain to his hotel, troubled
but determined upon his new role as his own soul's armourer. All that
was in him of romance and of chivalry was responding passionately to
the girl's unconscious revelation of her new need.