Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/784
rettes, and engaged in a conversation which she could never have believed her husband would have stood for ten minutes, and they parted with an expressed wish from her husband that they should meet again on the following day, and a wordless smile from the man. He had neither ratified nor negatived the arrangement.
"I hope he'll turn up," said her husband.
It was this conversation had excited her man, for it had drawn him into a mental atmosphere to which he was a stranger, and he had found himself moving there with such ease and pleasure that he wished to get back to it as often and with as little delay as possible.
Briefly, as he explained it to her, the atmosphere was religious, and while it was entirely intellectual it was more heady and exhilarating than the emotional religion to which he had been accustomed and from which he had long since passed.
He tried to describe his companion, but had such ill success that she could not remember afterwards whether he was tall or short, fat or thin, fair or dark. It was the man's eyes only he succeeded in emphasizing, and these, it appeared, were eyes such as he had never before seen in a human face. That also, he said, was a wrong way of putting it, for his eyes were exactly like everybody else's. It was the way he looked through them that was different—something, very steady, very ardent, immensely quiet and powerful, was using these eyes for purposes of vision; he had never met any one who looked at him so directly, so comprehendingly, so agreeably.
"You are in love," said she with a laugh.
After this her husband's explanations became more explanatory but not less confused until she found that they-were both with curious unconsciousness in the middle of a fairy tale.
"He asked me," said her husband, "what was the thing I wished for beyond all things."
"That is the most difficult question I have ever been invited to answer," he went on, "and for nearly half an hour we sat quietly thinking it out, and dlscussmg various magnificences and chances in life."
"I had all the usual thoughts and, of course, the first of them was wealth. I mentioned it too, tentatively, as a possibility, and he agreed that it was worth considering, but after a while I knew that I did not want money."
"One always has need of money," said his wife.