"
"You want something all to yourself--something that nobody else
knows or HAS known?"
"It isn't a question of what I 'want'--God knows I don't want
anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me-
-that I live with day by day."
He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it
further impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd
have been interested now.
"Is it a sense of coming violence?"
Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of
it as--when it does come--necessarily violent. I only think of it
as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it
simply as THE thing. THE thing will of itself appear natural."
"Then how will it appear strange?"
Marcher bethought himself. "It won't--to ME."
"To whom then?"
"Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you."
"Oh then I'm to be present?"
"Why you are present--since you know."
"I see." She turned it over. "But I mean at the catastrophe."
At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity;
it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together.
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