With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural.  Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before As upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true proportions.  She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.

After one of these glances she murmured, “Yes, I’m in love.  There’s no doubt; I’m in love with you.”

Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment separate and far away again.  Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, “It will be a fight.”

But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and she added: 

“Where I want to fight, you have compassion.  You’re finer than I am; you’re much finer.”

He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she had done, the very small individual things about her which made her delightful to him.  She was his for ever.  This barrier being surmounted, innumerable delights lay before them both.

“I’m not finer,” he answered.  “I’m only older, lazier; a man, not a woman.”

“A man,” she repeated, and a curious sense of possession coming over her, it struck her that she might now touch him; she put out her hand and lightly touched his cheek.  His fingers followed where hers had been, and the touch of his hand upon his face brought back the overpowering sense of unreality.  This body of his was unreal; the whole world was unreal.

“What’s happened?” he began.  “Why did I ask you to marry me?  How did it happen?”

“Did you ask me to marry you?” she wondered.  They faded far away from each other, and neither of them could remember what had been said.

“We sat upon the ground,” he recollected.

“We sat upon the ground,” she confirmed him.  The recollection of sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to unite them again, and they walked on in silence, their minds sometimes working with difficulty and sometimes ceasing to work, their eyes alone perceiving the things round them.  Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults, and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this time or at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling.  So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they scarcely listened to the words they framed.  Long silences came between their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily.  They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.