Or is it, he thought, that a man can create happiness by sheer obstinate force out of the machinery of his own mind, while a girl is dependent upon all manner of subtle external forces emanating from nature and returning to nature?

Certainly at this moment Gerda seemed to have most deliciously abandoned herself to the power of the grass, the grey sky, the warm, windless air.

A sad, helpless craving possessed him as he turned from the girl and once more surveyed that undemonstrative, unobtrusive distance. He felt as though he longed to fly across it in some impossible nonhuman shape⁠—fly across it not with any actual living companion, but with some shadowy essence, light as that dandelion-seed, which at this moment he saw rising high above him and floating away westward⁠—with some shadowy essence that at the same time was and was not Christie Malakite⁠—some essence that was what Christie was to her own inmost self, the bodiless, formless identity in that slim frame, that in confronting infinite space could only utter the mysterious words, “I am I,” and utter nothing else.