"After all, it's our honeymoon."
"All we shall get," said Ann Veronica.
"This place is very beautiful."
"Any place would be beautiful," said Ann Veronica, in a low voice.
For a time they walked in silence.
"I wonder," she began, presently, "why I love you--and love you so much?... I know now what it is to be an abandoned female. I AM an abandoned female. I'm not ashamed--of the things I'm doing. I want to put myself into your hands. You know--I wish I could roll my little body up small and squeeze it into your hand and grip your fingers upon it. Tight. I want you to hold me and have me SO.... Everything. Everything. It's a pure joy of giving--giving to YOU. I have never spoken of these things to any human being. Just dreamed--and ran away even from my dreams. It is as if my lips had been sealed about them. And now I break the seals--for you. Only I wish--I wish to-day I was a thousand times, ten thousand times more beautiful."
Capes lifted her hand and kissed it.
"You are a thousand times more beautiful," he said, "than anything else could be.... You are you. You are all the beauty in the world. Beauty doesn't mean, never has meant, anything--anything at all but you. It heralded you, promised you...."
Part 4
They lay side by side in a shallow nest of turf and mosses among bowlders and stunted bushes on a high rock, and watched the day sky deepen to evening between the vast precipices overhead and looked over the tree-tops down the widening gorge. A distant suggestion of chalets and a glimpse of the road set them talking for a time of the world they had left behind.
Capes spoke casually of their plans for work. "It's a flabby, loose-willed world we have to face. It won't even know whether to be scandalized at us or forgiving. It will hold aloof, a little undecided whether to pelt or not--"
"That depends whether we carry ourselves as though we expected pelting," said Ann Veronica.
"We won't."
"No fear!"
"Then, as we succeed, it will begin to sidle back to us. It will do its best to overlook things--"
"If we let it, poor dear."
"That's if we succeed. If we fail," said Capes, "then--"
"We aren't going to fail," said Ann Veronica.
Life seemed a very brave and glorious enterprise to Ann Veronica that day. She was quivering with the sense of Capes at her side and glowing with heroic love; it seemed to her that if they put their hands jointly against the Alps and pushed they would be able to push them aside. She lay and nibbled at a sprig of dwarf rhododendron.