“It is only to hear it,” he said impulsively.

“But I have often wished it myself,” she said slowly.  “There’s not a day that I have not wished it—­to give up everything and stay by you.  Do you know why?  From the longing that’s in me now, the first unselfish longing I have ever had—­to sacrifice myself for you in some way, somehow.  It is more than a hunger, it is a need of the soul—­of my love itself.  It comes over me sometimes as tears come to my eyes when you are away, and I say to myself, ‘I love him,’ and yet, Ben, I shall not, I shall never give up my career, not now, not for years to come.”

“No,” he said mechanically.

“We are two great idealists, for that is what you have made me, Ben.  Before I was always laughing, and I believed in nothing.  I despised even what my sacrifice had won.  Now, when I am with you, I remain in a revery, and I am happy—­happy with the happiness of things I cannot understand.  To-night, by your side, it seems to me I have never felt the night before or known the mystery of the silent, faint hours.  You have made me feel the loneliness of the human soul, and that impulse it must have before these things that are beyond us, that surround us, dominate us, to cling almost in terror to another soul.  You have so completely made me over that it is as though you had created me yourself.  I am thirty-five.  I have known everything else but what you have awakened in me, and because I have this knowledge and this hunger I can see clearer what we must do.  You and I are a little romanesque, but remember that even a great love may tire and grow stale, and that is what I won’t have, what must not be.”  Her voice had risen with the intensity of her mood.  She said more solemnly:  “You are afraid of other men, of other moods of mine—­you have no reason.  This love which comes to some as the awakening of life is to me the end of all things.  If anything should wound it or belittle it, I should not survive it.”

She continued to speak, in a low unvarying voice.  He felt his mind clear and his doubts dissipate, and impatiently he waited for her to end, to show her that his weakness of the moment was gone and that he was still the man of big vision who had awakened her.

“There are people who can put in order their love as they put in order their house.  We are not of that kind, Ben.  I am a woman who has lived on sensations.  You, too, are a dreamer and a poet at the bottom.  If I should give up the opera and become to you simply a housewife, if there was no longer any difficulty in our having each other, you would still love me—­yes, because you are loyal—­but the romanticism, the mystery, the longing we both need would vanish.  Oh, I know.  Well, you and I, we are the same.  We can only live on a great passion, and to have fierce, unutterable joys we must suffer also—­the suffering of separation.  Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do.”