She raised her head with a jerk, and rubbed her hands over her eyes. Why there had been no such episode! He had not folded her in his arms, nor drawn her to him, nor kissed her lips; though her breath was fluttering and her wrists burning in the bare memory of it; he had only drawn quite near to her, and held her hand; and once he had kissed it! How then had she reproduced all these sensations so vividly? Then indeed, shame came to her, as she realised how much more completely than he could know, she had, in one breathless instant, given herself to him!
It was that shame which came to her rescue, which set her upon her defence, which started her to the seeking for her justification. She had refused him, even at the very height of her most intense yielding. And why? She must go deeper into the detail of that. She had to grope her way slowly and painfully back through the quivering maze of her senses, to recall the point at which she had been taken rudely from the present into the future.
“I need you to walk hand in hand with me about the greatest work in the world!” That was it; the greatest work in the world! And what was that work? To live and teach ritual in place of religion; to turn worship into a social observance; to use helpless belief as a ladder of ambition; to reduce faith to words, and hope to a recitation, and charity to an obligation; to make pomp and ceremony a substitute for conscience, and to interpose a secretary between the human heart and God!
For just an instant Gail’s eyelids dropped, her long brown lashes curved upon her cheeks, while beneath them her eyes glinted, and a smile touched the corners of her lips; then she was serious again. No, she had decided wisely. They could not spend a lifetime in the ecstasy of touch. Between those rare moments of the rapture of love must come stern hours of waking. Then she must live a constant lie, she must battle down her own ideals and her own thoughts and her own worship and subscribe to a dead shell of pretence, which she had come to hold in contempt and even loathing. She must appear constantly before the world as subscribing to and upholding a sham which had been formulated as thoroughly as the multiplication table; and to do all these things she would be compelled to throttle her own dear Deity, with whom she had been friends since her babyhood, to whom she could go at any hour with pure faith and simple confidence; always in love and never in fear!