"'I _know_, that's all.' she said. And she slowly raised her arms and put her hands on my shoulders. 'Do not be a fool, Noël Anson,' she said gently. 'Life is not so easy. There is no romance without reality. I am warning you, because I am afraid.' "'And will you tell me when a warning has prevented a fool from being foolish? And besides, I like being a fool. And _I_ am not afraid. I'm not even afraid of your answer if I ask whether you love me.' "She laughed, but so lightly that she didn't break the tension--you know that infernal laugh? "'But that is a leading question!' she protested. "'And that is a dangerous way of answering it,' I had to say, though anything else would have done equally well, for I hadn't mind for words. She had lost her laugh and her eyes held mine. We stood there looking at each other.... As men and women will, when they know everything and nothing of each other. She was close to me, amazingly kissable! But I didn't, instead I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the door, and out into the strange hall, and up the strange wide staircase of this unknown house, up.... "But if my impulse was to carry her, hers was certainly to let me. Do you understand that, or am I cheapening her to you? Oh, but one was so uncertain yet certain about her, it was so good to be with a woman with whom one could lose one's head and be sure that she wouldn't lose her dignity--until that moment when she, like every one else, must become self-conscious. And that moment came, on the landing upstairs, when her fingers suddenly tightened around my arm. I let her stand, gently, and she whispered something, just two words, into my ear, but I didn't catch them, they are lost words.... She opened a door. "In there she suddenly turned on me, and shook my arm. And a sudden, queer darkness about her face made me wonder if she was angry. "'Oh, you are so inevitable, aren't you!' she cried, but the exclamation ended so surprisingly in the air, somehow so high up in the air, that I've never yet been able to bring it definitely down to earth and discover its meaning; unless it was that--I don't know.... She was so strange, so different from the other women who had filled and emptied one's life, and it was difficult to tell her moods from her emotions. But there was nothing spurious nor counterfeit about her, she was not unreal, she wasn't even the closely-knit but far away dream that beautiful women sometimes become in those terrifying, intimate moments. She was the most essentially feminine woman that I've ever met, she was so real.... That white oval face with the large, so large and so articulate eyes, set in a mass of soft black Southern hair which I myself had unpinned and let fall over her shoulders despite a shy murmur from her--why, desire is a cheap word to express the passion to possess that, the living symbol of the loveliest woman of all time! Yes, yes, I was supremely ridiculous. I still am....