"Do you suppose I think less of you because you love me--care for me in the many and inexplicable ways that a man cares for a woman?--because you want me as a man wants the woman he loves, as his wife if it may be so, as his _own_, anyhow?" She let her eyes rest on him in a new and fearless comprehension, tender, curious, sad by turns. "It is the romance of passion in you that has been fighting to awaken the Sleeping Princess of a legend," she said with a slight smile; "it is the same illogical, impulsive romance that draws back just as her closed lids tremble, fearing to awaken her to the sorrows and temptations of a world which, after all, God made for us to wake in." "Athalie! I am a scoundrel if I have--" "Oh, Clive!" she laughed, mocking the solemn measure of her own words; "adorable boy of impulse and romance, never to outgrow its magic armour, destined always to be ruled by dreams through the sweetest and most generous of hearts, you need not fear for me. I am already awake--at least I am sufficiently aroused to understand you--and something, too, of my own self which I have never hitherto understood." 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."