“You wrote them.”

“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”

“Yes.  But perhaps you do.”

I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”

“You think you—­you love me, Willie.  But you don’t.”

“I do.  Nettie!  You know I do.”

For answer she shook her head.

I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge.  “Nettie,” I said,
“I’d rather have you than—­than my own opinions.”

The selaginella still engaged her.  “You think so now,” she said.

I broke out into protestations.

“No,” she said shortly.  “It’s different now.”

“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.

“It isn’t only the letters.  But it is different.  It’s different for good.”

She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression.  She looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with the intimation that she thought our talk might end.

But I did not mean it to end like that.

“For good?” said I.  “No! . .  Nettie!  Nettie!  You don’t mean that!”

“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her pose conveying her finality.  She seemed to brace herself for the outbreak that must follow.

Of course I became wordy.  But I did not submerge her.  She stood entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered discursive attack.  I remember that our talk took the absurd form of disputing whether I could be in love with her or not.  And there was I, present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.

You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.

I pleaded, I argued.  I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her.  I made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her when I was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged and cool.  She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and impervious to its ideas.  I had no doubt—­whatever poverty in my words, coolly written down now—­that I was eloquent then.  I meant most intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it.  I was set upon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of my desire.  I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a jungle of words.

Her face changed very slowly—­by such imperceptible degrees as when at dawn light comes into a clear sky.  I could feel that I touched her, that her hardness was in some manner melting, her determination softening toward hesitations.  The habit of an old familiarity lurked somewhere within her.  But she would not let me reach her.