Isabel was with me body and mind.  But a terror crept upon me.  My very hair trembled.  I pressed her hand to my breast.  It seemed only an act of will, however, not of emotion.  I drew her head close to my breast.  All these actions arrayed themselves before my detached observation.  Paralyzing self-analysis preoccupied me.  I kissed her upon the brow, the eyes, with pressure and strength upon the lips.  I was not acting; I was thinking out these demonstrations.  The consciousness that I was deceiving Isabel broke my emotional concentration.  Could she sense that my heart was beating, but with terror?  Where were the flames that had sung to me ethereally before?  Where the song out of the flesh, but too subtle for the ears of flesh?  Yet I drew her closer to me, folded her tightly against my breast.  My imaginative strength was more and more absorbed in self-analysis, into wonder as to what weakness had taken place in me.  For here was Isabel dissolved in my arms and how could I continue this futile demonstration?  But why also desist?  The sweat began to stand out on my forehead.  What should I say?  Uncle Tom no longer stood between us.  Isabel was my bride.  There were no barriers to break down, no protests to overcome.  We were both of an age and of an experience where formalities lose their significance.  The goddess had descended to me and here was I a witless fool.  Finally there flashed into my mind what she had said to me in Rome:  “My friend, for this once be Orpheus—­Orpheus was once Dionysius.  Orpheus, tranquil and inspired, touched the quiet lyre surrounded by the Muses.  Orpheus had been Dionysius drinking wine, beating cymbals.  Be Orpheus, my friend, and take into your being these beauties of the mind which are given us—­these flowers of friendship attend and keep for our garden.”

These words ran through my tortured brain.  They completed my enervation.  But I could utter none of them to Isabel.  What fear that hatred was budding in the heart of this woman at my side!  I pressed her hands every now and then to see what was moving in her; for as my mind would not cease to analyze, analysis became keener.  Always she returned the pressure.  Her kisses at first given with ardent emotion were now lisped softly against my cheek.  So we sat side by side.  The rain pelted the window, the clock chimed.  And the night was passing.  A proposal of marriage seemed belated, incongruous.  Yet it came into my mind as a protective coloration to more immediate expressions of the moment.

Men have lost women because they dishonored them or betrayed them or changed for the time toward them—­for a thousand reasons.  But look at me.  What were friendship, truth, honor, the service of all that I was, love in its highest and deepest sense, understanding, sympathy with all of Isabel’s flights of the mind, if I could not come to her with a promise of the future?  She was not only the revelation of all that I had desired and of all that I had missed in life, but she was the symbol of a fate that has come past the appointed hour.  I was the father of Reverdy by Dorothy, whom I loved with a heart’s beginning; and I was the defeated lover of the ideal whom I had found too late.