I stood looking down on her. Her face was shell-like in its clear fairness and transparency, and the beautiful expressive eyebrows drawn delicately on the white forehead appealed to me.
The intimacy established between us, her complete willing sacrifice to me, her surrender, her trust in me, the knowledge of herself and her beauty she had allowed me gave birth suddenly in my heart to a great overwhelming tenderness and a necessity for its expression.
I bent over her, pressed my lips down on hers and held them there. She did not open her eyes, but raised her arms and put them round my neck, pressing me to her. In a joyous wave of emotion I threw myself beside her and drew the slender, supple figure into my arms.
"Trevor," she murmured, as soon as I would let her, "I am afraid you are falling in love with me."
"I have already," I answered. "I love you, I want for my own. You must marry me, and come and live at the studio."
"I don't think I can marry you," she replied in very soft tones, but she did not try to move from my clasp.
"Artists should not marry: it prevents their development. How old are you?"
"Twenty-eight," I answered, half-submerged in the delight of the contact with her, of knowing her in my arms, hardly willing or able to listen to what she said.
"Oh, I don't know," I answered. "I have been with lots, of course, but I don't think I have ever loved at all till now."
"What about the little girl in the tea-shop at Sitka?"
"I don't think I loved her. I wanted her as an experience."
"No, it isn't. It's quite different. Do not worry me with questions, Viola. Kiss me and tell me you love me."
She raised herself suddenly on one elbow and leant over me, kissing me on the eyes and lips, all over my face, with passionate intensity.
"I do love you. You are like my life to me, but I know I ought not to marry you. I should absorb you. You would love me. You would not want to be unfaithful to me. But fidelity to one person is madness an impossibility to an artist if he is to reach his highest development. It can't be. We must not think of it."
The blood went to my head in great waves. The supreme tenderness of a moment back seemed gone, her words had roused another phase of passion, the harsh fury of it.