"'I want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice that
trembled on a sob. 'Come close to me and tell it me again, again,
again!'
"Then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood of
passionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and
afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an engineering
problem at the exact point at which half an hour before, on her entrance
into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it.
"One day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question: 'Are you
playing for love or vanity?'
"To which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply: ''Pon my soul,
Jack, I couldn't tell you.'
"Now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind
whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where it
is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy.
"They continued to meet and to make love. They talked--as people in
their position are prone to talk--of the beautiful life they would lead
if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly paradise--or,
maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--they would each
create for the other, if only they had the right which they hadn't.
"In this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his literary
faculties, which were considerable; the woman to her desires.
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