"Well then you see how clever I am. I've put my finger straight on the place. You can't deny it. I see you as you are, and you don't see me; so that after all I've in a manner the advantage."
She spoke always but after little intervals; yet not as if to show she had taken one's words in, for his at least were never directly met. "I haven't waited till now to feel that you'd never be happy with me. I'm quite too stupid."
"That's but a way of saying that I'm quite too small. What need have I, all the same, of anyone else's wit?"
"I like men of action," she at last returned. "Men who've been through something."
"And I've been through nothing--I see--but the long discipline of my choked passion for you."
She kept answering--her bold grave eyes fixed on him, counting with nothing, evading nothing--as if she had not heard him. "If it could be a man of your kind at all it would be you. There are things in you I like so. But that you should give up anything for me--that I should find quite horrible. You must become great. Intellectually," she explained as if she quoted it out of a book.
"Yes," Ralph laughed even while he sighed--"dry up to it, shrivel down to it! You _must_ despise me to say such a thing as that to me! Why not tell me at once that you hope you may never see me again?"
"You're beautiful," she remarked without pity.
"A beautiful worm?" he asked; "a delicate classified insect? a slow-crawling library beetle, slightly iridescent, warranted compressible--that is resisting the squash--when the book is closed to on him?"
He appeared at this to take something of it in, or at any rate to make something of it out. "Why won't it just do then that one is a gentleman--and for all that not a fool?"
"Oh it does do--for being glad I know you and that you're just as you are. It's good to know there are people like you--though I assure you I don't dream there are many. You're beautiful," she observed once more.
"Thank you very much!" he observed with frank irritation. "I had rather you found me ugly enough to think of. If I could make out what it is you want one to have done I promise you it wouldn't leave me gaping. What is it, what is it?" he pressed. "There's something you've a fancy for that we're not in the way of--any of us: devilish poor lot as we are! I've at least this superiority, you see, that I want to know it. Name it--come, name it; and no matter how dreadful or how criminal it may be I won't flinch from it."