"Do I love you? For heaven's sake, would not any one love anything so young and wonderful when he sees it and feels it? What do you think? Skin and hair with the scent of May in them!" She freed herself from his arms and walked silently by his side for a little way. "Do you love me?" she asked again, as shaken and distraught as he was. "Do you know me? Do you know what I want in life?" "You want me!" he said passionately. She wanted to speak, she tried--tried--tried, but her excitement was too great. "Do you wish to be my friend?" she said at last, anxiously. "Yes--of course I do!" he answered. "Will you teach me how to think? I want to be as much alive as you are." "Silly child!" He would have taken her in his arms again; but she kept him off with passionate refusal. "I love you because you are different from the others, and so that you may speak to me as to a friend, as to a human being." "And don't I, then?" "I don't want to live my life asleep all the time, do you hear?" "What a strange little woman-thing you are! There's a time for kissing, and a time for everything, you babe!" "Life is what I long for!" she cried, trembling with the uncertainty of what it was she wanted. "Life? Love _is_ life!" "No, no! To understand--that is life. If I join my life to yours, I want to be alive, and not dead and dumb as my mother was." "You have queer notions. Do you suppose, then, that people can learn how to think as they learn any other trade f I tell you, what you've got to do is to love life--I'll make it my business to see that you love it!" "I shouldn't like to be cast off," she said with a kind of bitterness, "when you thought I was no longer beautiful. I should run away from you if you deceived me and were no longer my friend." "All right," he said, laughing. So they walked along close together, and he kept his arm tightly about her waist. "Bound," he said, "you will walk more freely and happily than unbound. Everything is not what it seems to be. You catch sight of a thought or a feeling, and you imagine it is as simple and as limited as a point. You come closer to it, and you find it grows, it turns into a garden with all sorts of walks and labyrinths. You walk about in it and are astonished. Then under your very feet it changes to a wilderness full of precipices and impenetrable thickets. The wilderness grows to a world, which you can never see the whole of and never come to the end of. All things are included in this world, all things and everything. "It is very much less trouble to take things as simply and smoothly as most people do than to try to move huge blocks of thought. Thinking is like drinking--a man easily falls into it, if the shoe pinches anywhere. And what does he get out of it? An endless struggle with headaches. He's got to be a hero to keep it up. Do you think you'd ever get used to drinking?" "I don't think so," laughed the girl.