"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette," Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such an uncanny and charming creature;--the future doesn't exist for him at all."
Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had now become so beautifully appropriate,--for what is literalness but a seeing of the fact as standing still?--Kitty tried to smile but begged him not to jest about such things.
"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."
She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do you hate to leave me!"
She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now to soothe her passionate weeping.
He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise. Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.
Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;--it didn't go quite so fast or carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty seemed to swing even faster and further.
She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious, and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both. Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a mark.