“But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff,” she said. “Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the wave’s reflection.”
“It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there,” said the priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,—“and there, I think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and a full beating upon many shores—”
“Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even,” she said half-reflectively, “when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always with the calling in my ears—” She seemed to have dropped altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not understand.
“After all,” she said practically, “what has that to do with it? One doesn’t blame these people. They are stupid—that’s all. They want the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope— without the smallest diamond—who does song and dance on Saturday nights—what can you expect! If I had a great name they would be pleased enough to see me. It is one of the rewards of the fame.” She was silent for a moment, and then she added, “They are very poor.”
“Those rewards! I have sometimes thought,” Arnold said, “that you were not devoured by thirst for them.”
“When we are together, you and I,” she answered simply, “I never am.”