THE SACRED FOUNT
"Oh, it would take more than the whole night—even if we had it!"
"By which you suggest that we haven't it?"
"No—we haven't it. I want to get away."
"To go to bed? I thought you were so keen."
"I am keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want to get away."
"To leave the house—in the middle of the night?"
"Yes—absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what you do to me."
He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing he said. "If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell me to-morrow?"
I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. "Oh, tomorrow I shall be off in space!"
"Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will enable us to talk?"
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