It was true, as he acquired knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer, talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common; but this did not satisfy his lover’s yearning.  His lover’s imagination had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship with him in the flesh.  It was his own love that thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for him.  Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired.

And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever narrower.  They had been eating cherries—­great, luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.  And later, as she read aloud to him from “The Princess,” he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips.  For the moment her divinity was shattered.  She was clay, after all, mere clay, subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or anybody’s clay.  Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed them as cherries dyed his.  And if so with her lips, then was it so with all of her.  She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.  It came upon him abruptly.  It was a revelation that stunned him.  It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen worshipped purity polluted.

Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could stain.  He trembled at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right.  Something of this change in him must have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at him, and smiled.  His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him.  His arms all but flashed out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.  She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to hold him back.

“You were not following a word,” she pouted.

Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he looked into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of what he felt, he became abashed.  He had indeed in thought dared too far.  Of all the women he had known there was no woman who would not have guessed—­save her.  And she had not guessed.  There was the difference.  She was different.  He was appalled by his own grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her across the gulf.  The bridge had broken down.