“No, no. You don’t. You can’t. It would, for a year, perhaps, perhaps only for a day, be dream and ecstasy,--ah, Eppie, don’t imagine that I don’t know what it would be,--the beauty, the joy, the forgetfulness, a radiant mist hanging over an abyss. Your will could keep me in it--for a year, perhaps. But then, the inevitable fading. See what comes. Eppie, don’t you know, don’t you feel, that I’m dead--dead?”
“No; not while you suffer. You are suffering now--for me.”
“The shadow of a shadow. It will pass. No, don’t speak; wait; as you said, we can’t argue, we can’t, now, go into the reasons of it. As you said, thought can’t cure me; it’s probably something far deeper than our little thought: it’s probably the aspect we are fated to be by that one reality that makes and unmakes our dreams. And I’m not of the robust Western stuff that can work in its dream,--create more dream, and find it worth while. I’ve not enough life in me to create the illusion of realities to strive for. Action, to me, brings no proof of life’s reality; it’s merely a symptom of life, its result, not its cause or its sanction. And the power of action is dead in me because the desire of life is dead,--unless you are there to infect me with it.”
“Yes, you are,--can I forget it? And I’m yours--while you want me. But, Eppie, look at it; look at it straight. See the death that I will bring into the very heart of your life. See the children we may have; see what they would mean to you, and what they would mean to me: Transient appearances; creatures lovely and pathetic, perhaps, but empty of all the significance that you would find in them. I would have no love for our children, Eppie, as you understand love. We will grow old, and all the glamour will go--all the passion that holds us together now. I will be kind--and sorry; but you will know that, beside you, I watch you fading into listlessness, indifference, death, and know that even if I am to weep over you, dead, I will feel only that you have escaped forever, from me, from consciousness, from life. Eppie, don’t delude yourself with one ray of hope. To me your faith is a mirage. And it all comes to that. Have you faith enough to foresee all the horror of emptiness that you’ll find in me for the sake of one year of ecstasy?”