“I have not spoken a word to you that I do not mean,” he added.
“Tell me then what it is that you mean,” she said at length.
As if obeying a common instinct, they both stopped and, bending slightly over the balustrade of the river, looked into the flowing water.
“You say that we’ve got to be honest,” Ralph began. “Very well. I will try to tell you the facts; but I warn you, you'll think me mad. It’s a fact, though, that since I first saw you four or five months ago I have made you, in an utterly absurd way, I expect, my ideal. I’m almost ashamed to tell you what lengths I’ve gone to. It’s become the thing that matters most in my life.” He checked himself. “Without knowing you, except that you're beautiful, and all that, I’ve come to believe that we're in some sort of agreement; that we’re after something together; that we see something. . . . I’ve got into the habit of imagining you; I’m always thinking what you’d say or do; I walk along the street talking to you; I dream of you. It’s merely a bad habit, a school-boy habit, day-dreaming; it’s a common experience; half one’s friends do the same; well, those are the facts.”
Simultaneously, they both walked on very slowly.
“If you were to know me you would feel none of this,” she said. “We don’t know each other—we’ve always been—interrupted. . .. Were you going to tell me this that day my aunts came?” she asked, recollecting the whole scene.
He bowed his head.
“The day you told me of your engagement,” he said. She thought, with a start, that she was no longer engaged.
“I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you,” he went on. “I should feel it more reasonably—that’s all. I shouldn’t talk the kind of nonsense I’ve talked to-night.
