“Mildred, I’m sorry I am out of breath. But I have breath enough to say
what must come first of all this evening ... first of all, all my life.
Mildred, I love you.”
Her eyes deepen and grow soft. Her delicate face is a hard fragility
about the brooding thought of her eyes. She sits down.
“Come,” she says in a voice that is like her eyes even as before it had
been like her face. “Sit down beside me, John. Here.”
She leads me, holding my hand. When I am beside her on the couch her
hand lifts from mine as if it had been kissed.
“You mean,” she said, “that you love me really, John? that you want me
to live with you, John?”
“I want you to be my wife.”
“Does that mean, you are sure you love only me? That you will never
want to live with another woman?”
My eyes gave her my answer: she saw in them, also, my surprise at her
questions. She went blithely on.
“Could you love me, John, and also sometimes still love someone else?”
“It might be, Mildred. But in that case I would not now pray as I do,
that you may become my wife.”
She looked down at my hand and her little fist beat on it softly.
“How am I to know?”
“Mildred, know what...?”
“If you said to me: ‘Give me a kiss,’ I would kiss you for I feel like
that. If you said to me: ‘Come with me for a week,’ I would say yes,
for I think that for a week I could be sure that I would feel that way
... and if I did not, why a week comes to a close. But no man asks me
that! No man tries to kiss me. They all say: ‘Mildred, I love you. I
shall always love you. I want you for my wife.’ That means forever and
ever. You are all so sure. How can I be sure?”
“Will you give me a kiss, Mildred?”
She leaned forward and her lips were faintly parted. My mouth touched
hers, and my eyes saw within her gown her perfect breasts like
porcelain cups, red-tipped.... She was straight again and smiling. I
hid my face in my arms, fighting to master the storm that her cold lips
had loosed.
“John ... did my kiss hurt you, then?”
“No, Mildred. But I suffer. You are so perfect and so brave: and you
feel nothing.”
“That is not so! I liked your kiss.”
“Mildred, beside the anguish and the joy that I feel, you feel nothing.”
She held my hand in her two palms.
“Tell me what to do.”
“Believe in me, Mildred.”
“Why, I do believe in you!”
“Above all else ... above all others.”
“Why? Why must it be only you?”
“Because that is love, Mildred. Because I could not bear it any other
way. Because the death of not having you would be as nothing beside
the death of sharing you even with another’s thought. Because only in
the unity, in the solitary oneness of two souls can love live.”
Mildred shook her head, and her gold curls rang about her ears.
“You talk like someone else. Yes,” she faced me, “someone who loves
me, too, and wants me whole and for always and can’t bear any other
eyes but his own looking upon me. Someone else whose wishes I’d obey
reasonably, John, as I obeyed yours, when you said: ‘Give me a kiss.’”
Her eyes were cool and happy despite their problem. “But he doesn’t ask
reasonable things. He wants me forever and ever. How can I promise him
that? And how can I promise him what I can’t give him at once?”
“Who is he, Mildred?” I forced the words and they came like gray ghosts
out of my mouth.
“Oh, you don’t know him. I’ve known him long. And he’s wonderful, too.
Like you are. But different. In every way, different. You don’t,” she
smiled, “encroach on each other at all. He’s big and dark, and rather
slow. And you are wonderfully quick. He is a poet and smells always of
pipe tobacco. His hands are gnarled....”
“He loves you.”
“I think as much as you do, John. His words are strangely like yours,
even though he himself is so different. That is important, is it not?
He asked me one reasonable thing ... one thing I could do.”
“What was that, Mildred?”
“To come to his rooms.”
“Mildred!”
“He has a lovely place down on Washington Square. I supposed, when he
had me there, he’d want to kiss me. But no ... he’s unreasonable, just
like you. He frightened me. He left me so alone. I was almost chilly,
I assure you. With his pacing up and down: saying ‘I love you. I want
you. I love you,’ and not even taking my hand.” She reached for mine.
“You see,” she smiled, “he is even less reasonable than you. You at
least kissed me.”
I was up from the couch. She had held my hand. I snatched it from
her. I began to pace, till the thought came that _he_ had done this.
I stopped and faced her. I pulled her up and held her in my arms. I
covered her face with kisses. I found her throat in my dazed ecstasy;
I pressed my mouth within the gauze of her gown. Her cool hand stopped
me, and she held me off.
“No,” she said. “No, I cannot.”
“Why? If you mean what you said. Why?”
Her eyes took on a serious dark question: and I knew how right I was to
love her for the splendor of her chastity. For ere she answered me, she
was seeking deep within her soul the reason, the quiet reason.
In that true moment when with head bowed she went within herself to
give me answer why she had denied me, I knew the greatness of my love,
and how she was greater than I, and how my sultry passion had been an
ugly shred tangenting from my love.
“Mildred,” I said in her silence, “you will give your answer. But in
your search I can tell you already that you were right; even for my
sake, in the light of my own love, you were right to hold me off.
You cannot be taken that way. You cannot be stormed. Mating with you
must be the peaceful meeting of two equal wills. And it must come to
be within a quiet deep and great like itself. There is a passionate
stillness more powerful than any tempest. I shall not kiss you again,
my love, until you know that kiss for the threshold to our life.”
Her eyes were heavy with thinking. They grew bright.
“Then you agree, even in that, with Philip!”
I nodded. I could not hate him when his name, whoever he was, lived on
her lips.
“And now I can tell you why I pushed you off.”
“Why, Mildred?”
She moved her head slowly from side to side; she sat down; she smoothed
her gown downward from her neck.
“I have learned something ... here.” Her hands with a sharp candor,
while her eyes met mine, followed the gauze I had ruffled, and cupped
her breasts. “I care for you, and I care for Philip. I thought that was
enough: that I could blindly let time order ... time and mood ... what
each of you wanted of me, and what I wanted to give. It is not so. Time
counts terribly! Before I can give myself to either of you, I must know
which of you I want to take me first. And then I feel ... I feel, when
I have learned who is first, there may be no second!”
“Mildred, you see that I was right? You have learned what I knew when I
first saw you. Before I saw you I held myself for you. I denied myself.
Not only did I know there could be no one beyond you ... none even
before you!”
She was murmuring almost to herself: “It was your mouth on my breast.
Your hot mouth marking my flesh, that made me know....”
“You would have hated me, were it not I....”
She shook her head: “Philip might have kissed me. How should I know?”