The Brimming Cup | Page 7

beside the fact that I love you. That's big enough to overtop everything else."
He raised his voice and spoke out boldly to the undefined specter in her mind. "And if it's the mating instinct you mean, that may be fooling both of us, because of our youth and bodily health . . . good heavens! Isn't our love deep enough to absorb that a million times over, like the water of a little brook flowing into the sea? Do you think that, which is only a little trickle and a harmless and natural and healthy little trickle, could unsalt the great ocean of its savor? Why, Marise, all that you're so afraid of, all that they've made you so afraid of, . . . it's like the little surface waves . . . well, call it the big storm waves if you want to . . . but nothing at all, the biggest of them, compared to the stillness in the depths of the sea. Why, I love you! Do I believe in myself? Of course I believe in myself, because I have you."
She drew a long sigh and, closing her eyes, murmured, "I feel as though I were lifted up on a great rock." After a moment, opening her eyes, she said, "You are better than I, you know. I'm not at all sure that I could say that. I never knew before that I was weak. But then I never met strength before."
"You're not weak," he told her; adding quaintly, "maybe a little overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any other cargo, as yet."
She was nettled at this, and leaving her slow, wide-winged poise in the upper airs, she veered and with swallow-like swiftness darted down on him. "That sounds patronizing and elder-brotherish," she told him. "I've taken on all sorts of cargo that you don't know anything about. In ever so many ways you seem positively . . . na?ve! You needn't go thinking that I'm always highstrung and fanciful. I never showed that side to anybody before, never! Always kept it shut up and locked down and danced and whooped it up before the door. You know how everybody always thinks of me as laughing all the time. I do wish everything hadn't been said already so many times. If it weren't that it's been said so often, I'd like to say that I have always been laughing to keep from crying."
"Why don't you say it, if that is what you mean?" he proposed.
She looked at him marveling. "I'm so fatuous about you!" she exclaimed; "the least little thing you say, I see the most wonderful possibilities in it. I know you'd say what you meant, no matter how many thousands had said it before. And since I know it's not stupidness in you, why, it seems to me just splendidly and simply courageous, a kind of courage I'd never thought of before. I see now, how, after all, those stupid people had me beaten, because I'd always thought that a person either had to be stupid so that he didn't know he was saying something everybody else had said, or else not say it, even if he wanted to, ever so much, and it was just what he meant."
"Don't you think maybe you're too much bothered about other people, anyhow?" he suggested, mildly; "whether they're stupid or have said things or not? What difference does it make, if it's a question of what you yourself feel? I'd be just as satisfied if you gave all your time to discovering the wonderful possibilities in what I say. It would give me a chance to conceal the fact that I get all out of breath trying to follow what you mean."
This surprised her into a sudden laugh, outright and ringing. He looked down at her sparkling face, brilliant in its mirth as a child's, and said seriously, "You must instantly think of something perfectly prosaic and commonplace to say, or I shall be forced to take you in my arms and kiss you a great many times, which might have Lord knows what effect on that gloomy-minded ticket-seller back of us who already has his suspicions."
She rose instantly to the possibilities and said smoothly, swiftly, whimsically, with the accent of drollery, "I'm very particular about what sort of frying-pan I use. I insist on having a separate one for the fritures of fish, and another for the omelets, used only for that: I'm a very fine and conscientious housekeeper, I'd have you know, and all the while we lived in Bayonne I ran the house because Mother never got used to French housekeeping ways. I was the one who went to market .