"I grant you absolution."
"I don't want absolution. I want to make myself visible to you."
"I wish I could make you visible to yourself. I don't believe in the faults. They're just a joyous softening of the outline--more beautiful than perfection. Like the flaws of an old marble. If you talk of your faults, I shall talk of your splendors."
"I do want to tell you things, nevertheless."
"We'll have, thank God! ten myriad days to tell each other things. When I think of it--"
"But these are things I want to tell you now!"
"I made a little song of it. Let me say it to you. I've no name for it yet. Epithalamy might do.
"Like him who stood on Darien I view uncharted sea Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights Before my Queen and me.
"And that only brings me up to about sixty-five!
"A glittering wilderness of time That to the sunset reaches No keel as yet its waves has ploughed Or gritted on its beaches.
"And we will sail that splendor wide, From day to day together, From isle to isle of happiness Through year's of God's own weather."
"Yes," said his prospective fellow-sailor, "that's very pretty." She stopped short, full of things un-said. Pretty! Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights!
"You shall tell me your faults," said Manning. "If they matter to you, they matter."
"It isn't precisely faults," said Ann Veronica. "It's something that bothers me." Ten thousand! Put that way it seemed so different.
"Then assuredly!" said Manning.
She found a little difficulty in beginning. She was glad when he went on: "I want to be your city of refuge from every sort of bother. I want to stand between you and all the force and vileness of the world. I want to make you feel that here is a place where the crowd does not clamor nor ill-winds blow."
"That is all very well," said Ann Veronica, unheeded.
"That is my dream of you," said Manning, warming. "I want my life to be beaten gold just in order to make it a fitting setting for yours. There you will be, in an inner temple. I want to enrich it with hangings and gladden it with verses. I want to fill it with fine and precious things. And by degrees, perhaps, that maiden distrust of yours that makes you shrink from my kisses, will vanish.... Forgive me if a certain warmth creeps into my words! The Park is green and gray to-day, but I am glowing pink and gold.... It is difficult to express these things."