'You called it "getting out" while the body is asleep,' came floating
through the air through the sound of Jimbo's breathing, 'whereas
_I_ called it getting away from self while personal desire is asleep.
But the idea is the same....'
His cousin's words that called forth this criticism he had not heard.
It was only her sentence that seemed to reach him.
From the river of words and actions men call life she detained, it
seemed to him, certain that were vital and important in some
symbolical sense; she italicised them, made them her own--then let
them go to join the main stream again. This selection was a kind of
genius. The river did not overwhelm her as it overwhelms most, because
the part of it she did not need for present action she ignored, while
yet she swam in the whole of it, shirking nothing.
This was the way he saw her--immediately. And, whether it was his own
invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of
sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because
he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of
intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was
_there_; explanation could bring it no nearer. He let the explanations
go their way; they floated everywhere within reach; he had only to
pocket them and take them home for study at his leisure afterwards--
with her.
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