He did not press for a reason and the next moment she went on in her natural manner again.  “That’s a strange thing for you to wish.  At least the strangeness of it strikes me after some of the things that have been happening lately.  Yet I don’t believe it happens often that a lover asks as specifically as that to be—­disillusioned.  And that is what you would be.  Because the complete story of a day,—­any day,—­with no suppressions, nothing tucked decently away out of sight, would be a pretty searching test.”

“That’s why I asked for it,” he said, “I’d like to be disillusioned; just as completely as possible.”

“That’s because you’re so sure you wouldn’t be.”  The raggedness of her voice betrayed a strong emotion.  With a leap of the pulse he told himself that it was as if she were crying out against some unforeseen hope.  “You think it would merely be that lovely little image of yours—­the Dumb Princess, coming to life.”

“I’d rather have the reality,” he told her, “whatever it is.  I think I can make you see that that must be true.  The person I love is you who are sitting there across the table from me.  I don’t believe that any one in the world was ever more completely and utterly adored than you are being adored at this moment.  I love the things I know you by.  The things I’ve come to recognize as yours.  I know some of your qualities that way; your sensitiveness, your uprightness, your fastidious honesty that makes you hate evasions and substitutes,—­everything you mean when you say sentimentality.  And I know your resolution that carries you along even when you are afraid,—­when your sensitiveness makes you afraid.  I admire all those qualities, but it isn’t their intrinsic worth that makes me love them.  I love them because they’re the things I know you by.  I can’t be mistaken about them because I’ve felt them.  Just as I’ve felt your hands and your mouth and your hair.  Well, then, whatever your days have been, one day after another, they have in the end produced you sitting there as you sit now.  Whatever your—­ingredients are they’re your ingredients.  The total works out to you.  Whereas my illusions work out to nothing better than my little image of the Dumb Princess.”

“Would it surprise you,” she asked, “to know that I could be cruel?  I mean exactly what the word means.  Like a little boy who tears the legs off a beetle.  Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I needn’t have hurt at all?  Some one who was trying in his own way to be kind to me?”

He smiled.  “I can imagine your being cruel to a sentimentalist,” he said.  “Not deliberately, of course.  Only after you had been hounded, like a little white cat, into a corner.  By some one who wanted you for an image, merely, that he himself could attribute all the appropriate thoughts and desires to.  I can imagine you turning, at last, and rending him;—­limb from limb, if you like.”

She gazed at him, wide-eyed, for a long moment; then she drooped forward over the table and cradled her head in her arms.  With his hands he tried to comfort her but he felt that they were clumsy and ineffectual.