he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel
which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home,
or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember,
nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was
that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free,
as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She,
conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede,
in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been.
There's a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit.
But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes
the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined,
may be set free, through some circumstance or other,
and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then,
what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored?
All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that
he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love
that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch
of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why,
he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it,
being dead to joy.




A Tale.

(The Epilogue to `The Two Poets of Croisic'.)