“he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You can't say a thing against him or I—except that something—something in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice—fails for me. Why don't I love him?—he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,—a gentleman. You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time....”
We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the substance of their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service of jealousy.
“The mass of people don't feel these things in quite the same manner as we feel them,” she said. “Is it because they're different in grain, or educated out of some primitive instinct?”
“It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more than the gateway,” I said. “Lust and then jealousy; their simple conception—and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in hand....”
I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue. And then we lay and looked at