The Brimming Cup

She shook her head confidently. "You can't scare me with any such

hideous possibilities. It's not possible that we shouldn't ever have

met, both of us being in the world. Didn't you ever study chemistry?

Didn't they teach you there are certain elements that just will come

together, no matter how you mix them up with other things?"

He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them, mellowing

richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.

She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning

already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to

the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim. "Don't you believe

that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she

asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley? Maybe

it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill. Maybe I'd

have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again."

He was still silent.

She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we

could have passed all our lives and never have seen each other?"

He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and

uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said

regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the

faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had

taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a

sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And what

on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any plans

at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get

through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and house

. . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to go to

Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off somewhere,

somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was pretty restless

in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization was worth the

candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in

focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome,

running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully

literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, do you, dear?"