And he quenched his thirst....
His thought played round her without ceasing, like flowing water....
This idea of flux grew everywhere about him. There was fluid movement
in this world within a world. All life was a flowing past of ceaseless
beauty, wonder, splendour; it was doubt and question that dammed the
rush, causing that stoppage which is ugly, petty, rigid. His being
flowed out to mingle with her own. It was all inevitable, and he never
really doubted once. Only before long he would be compelled to act--to
speak--to tell her what he felt, and hear her dear, dear answer....
The excitement in him became more and more difficult to control.
Already there was strain and tension below his apparent outer
calmness. Life in him burst forward to a yet greater life than he had
ever known....
The others--it was his cousin's voice this time--were speaking of the
Story, and of his proposed treatment of it in its larger version as a
book. Daddy was saying, apparently, that it must fail because he saw
no climax for it. The public demanded a cumulative interest that
worked up to some kind of thrilling denouement that they called a
climax, whereas his tale was but a stretch of life, and of very
ordinary life. And Life, for the majority, knew no such climax. How
could he manage one without inventing something artificial?
'But the climax of life comes every day and every minute,' he heard
her answer--and how her little voice rang out above the others like a
bell!--'when you deny yourself for another, and that other does not
even know it.
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