our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. we did not meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same place. but there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different mood. we had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great shrubbery, a huge shattered corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco giving wide views of the hills towards alfridsham between its three erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. it was an overcast morning, i remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. and we were at cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that mary did not mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the future, that all the heroic common cause i wanted with her, was quite alien to her dreams.
"but mary," i said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you love me? don't you want me?"
"you know i love you, stevenage," she said. "you know."
"but if two people love one another, they want to be always together, they want to belong to each other."
she looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning. "stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "i want to belong to myself."
"naturally," i said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then paused.
"why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?" she asked. "why must it be like that?"
i do not remember how i tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "one loves," i may have said. the subtle scepticisms of her mind went altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "if you love me," i urged, "if you love me—— i want nothing better in all my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."
she surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.
"i love meeting you," she said. "i love your going because it means that afterwards you will come again. i love this—this slipping out to you. but up there, there is a room in the house that is my place—me—my own. nobody follows me there. i want to go on living, stevenage, just as i am living now. i don't want to become someone's certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. no, not even to you."
"but if you love," i cried.
"to you least of all. don't you see?—i want to be wonderful to you, stevenage, more than to anyone. i want—i want always to make your heart beat faster. i want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating faster. always and always i want it to be like that. just as it has been on these mornings. it has been beautiful—altogether beautiful."
"yes," i said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues i had never faced before.
"it isn't," i said, "how people live."
"it is how i want to live," said mary.
"it isn't the way life goes."
"i want it to be. why shouldn't it be? why at any rate shouldn't it be for me?"
