"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love denied
was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me? They
saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat and
still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem of
satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming in
their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing in and
out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats, and again
shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone can utter.

"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice,
that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-
player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a
sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor,
comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips
that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought
by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with desire.'

"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of Love.
They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with others,
in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled Love with
caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the pit of satiety.