She looked down at my hand and her little fist beat on it softly. “How am I to know?” “Mildred, know what...?” “If you said to me: ‘Give me a kiss,’ I would kiss you for I feel like that. If you said to me: ‘Come with me for a week,’ I would say yes, for I think that for a week I could be sure that I would feel that way ... and if I did not, why a week comes to a close. But no man asks me that! No man tries to kiss me. They all say: ‘Mildred, I love you. I shall always love you. I want you for my wife.’ That means forever and ever. You are all so sure. How can I be sure?” “Will you give me a kiss, Mildred?” She leaned forward and her lips were faintly parted. My mouth touched hers, and my eyes saw within her gown her perfect breasts like porcelain cups, red-tipped.... She was straight again and smiling. I hid my face in my arms, fighting to master the storm that her cold lips had loosed. “John ... did my kiss hurt you, then?” “No, Mildred. But I suffer. You are so perfect and so brave: and you feel nothing.” “That is not so! I liked your kiss.” “Mildred, beside the anguish and the joy that I feel, you feel nothing.” She held my hand in her two palms. “Tell me what to do.” “Believe in me, Mildred.” “Why, I do believe in you!” “Above all else ... above all others.” “Why? Why must it be only you?” “Because that is love, Mildred. Because I could not bear it any other way. Because the death of not having you would be as nothing beside the death of sharing you even with another’s thought. Because only in the unity, in the solitary oneness of two souls can love live.” Mildred shook her head, and her gold curls rang about her ears. “You talk like someone else. Yes,” she faced me, “someone who loves me, too, and wants me whole and for always and can’t bear any other eyes but his own looking upon me. Someone else whose wishes I’d obey reasonably, John, as I obeyed yours, when you said: ‘Give me a kiss.’” Her eyes were cool and happy despite their problem. “But he doesn’t ask reasonable things. He wants me forever and ever. How can I promise him that? And how can I promise him what I can’t give him at once?” “Who is he, Mildred?” I forced the words and they came like gray ghosts out of my mouth. “Oh, you don’t know him. I’ve known him long. And he’s wonderful, too. Like you are. But different. In every way, different. You don’t,” she smiled, “encroach on each other at all. He’s big and dark, and rather slow. And you are wonderfully quick. He is a poet and smells always of pipe tobacco. His hands are gnarled....” “He loves you.” “I think as much as you do, John. His words are strangely like yours, even though he himself is so different. That is important, is it not? He asked me one reasonable thing ... one thing I could do.” “What was that, Mildred?” “To come to his rooms.” “Mildred!”