He laughed. "I sometimes think my genius is a phantasm we've manufactured between us. When I'm not with you I don't believe in it—I don't believe in anything when I'm not with you."

"Oh, Vance, don't—don't blaspheme!"

"Blaspheme! The only blasphemy would be to say that you're not the whole earth to me!"

Still she did not move; and her immobility held him spellbound on the hearth. "That's too much to be to anyone," he heard her murmur, and immediately afterward: "All I've wanted was to help you with your books… ."

"My books? My books?" He moved a step or two nearer to her, and then stood checked again by her immobility. "What do you suppose books are made of?" he cried. "Paper and ink, or the marrow of a man's bones and the blood of his brain? But you're in my books, you're part of them, whether you want to be or not, whether you believe in them or despise them, whether you believe in me or despise me; and you're in me, in my body and blood, just as you're in my books, and just as fatally. It's done now and you can't get away from me, you can't undo what you've done: you're the thoughts I think, and the visions I see, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat—and everything, everything, in the earth and over it… ."

He broke off, startled by his own outburst. He who was in general so tongue-tied, to whom eloquence came only with the pen, what power had driven this rush of words from him? Some fiery fusion of his whole being, the heightening and merging of every faculty, seemed to have unloosed his tongue. And it was all as he had said. He and his art and this woman were one, indissolubly one in a passionate mutual understanding. He and she understood each other—didn't she know it?—with their intelligences and their emotions, with their eyes, their hands, their lips. Ah, her lips! All he could see now was the shape of her lips, that mouth haunted by all the smiles that had ever played over it, as if they were gathered up in her like shut flowerbuds.

"Didn't you know—didn't you know?" he stammered.

She had risen and stood a little way off from him. "About you—?"

"About you and me. There's no difference. Is there any difference?"

He moved closer and caught her hands in his. They lay there like birds with their wings folded; birds that are frightened, and then suddenly lie still, with little subsiding palpitations. He was trying to see her face, to trace it line by line. "One of your eyebrows is a little higher than the other—I never noticed it before!" he cried exultantly, as if he had made an earthshaking discovery. She laughed a little and slipped her hands out of his.

"Oh, stop exploring me—you frighten me," she murmured.