He forgot what he was waiting
for. He forgot to expect Dr. Levillier. Two visions alternated in glaring
contrast before the eyes of his brain--life with Valentine, and life
without him. It is so we watch the trance, or death,--we know not
which,--of those whom we love, with a greedy, beautiful selfishness.
They are themselves only in relation to us. They live, they die, in that
wonderful relation. To live is to be with us; to die, to go away from us.
There are women who love so much that they angrily expostulate with the
dying, as if indeed the dying deliberately elected to depart out of their
arms. Do we not all feel at moments the "You could stay with me, if only
you had the will!" that is the last bitter cry of despairing affection?
Julian, sitting there, while Valentine lay silent and the dog slept by
his breast, saw ever and ever those two lives, flashing and fading like
lamps across a dark sea, life with, life without, him. The immensity of
the contrast, the millions of airy miles between those two life-worlds,
appalled him, for it revealed to him what mighty issues of joy and grief
hung upon the almost visionary thin thread of one little life. It is
ghastly to be so idiotically dependent. Yet who, at some time, is not?
And those who are independent lose, by their power, their possible
Paradise.
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