"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till
now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable," he
explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't what my affair's to be."

"You want something all to yourself--something that nobody else knows or
_has_ known?"

"It isn't a question of what I 'want'--God knows I don't want anything.
It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me--that I live with
day by day."

He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further
impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd have been
interested now.

"Is it a sense of coming violence?"

Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of it
as--when it does come--necessarily violent. I only think of it as
natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply
as _the_ thing. _The_ thing will of itself appear natural."

"Then how will it appear strange?"

Marcher bethought himself. "It won't--to _me_."

"To whom then?"

"Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you."