or you to wish. At least
the strangeness of it strikes me after some of the things that have been
happening lately. Yet I don't believe it happens often that a lover asks
as specifically as that to be--disillusioned. And that is what you would
be. Because the complete story of a day,--any day,--with no
suppressions, nothing tucked decently away out of sight, would be a
pretty searching test."

"That's why I asked for it," he said, "I'd like to be disillusioned; just
as completely as possible."

"That's because you're so sure you wouldn't be." The raggedness of her
voice betrayed a strong emotion. With a leap of the pulse he told himself
that it was as if she were crying out against some unforeseen hope. "You
think it would merely be that lovely little image of yours--the Dumb
Princess, coming to life."

"I'd rather have the reality," he told her, "whatever it is. I think I
can make you see that that must be true. The person I love is you who are
sitting there across the table from me. I don't believe that any one in
the world was ever more completely and utterly adored than you are being
adored at this moment. I love the things I know you by. The things I've
come to recognize as yours. I know some of your qualities that way; your
sensitiveness, your uprightness, your fastidious honesty that makes you
hate evasions and substitutes,--everything you mean when you say
sentimentality. And I know your resolution that carries you along even
when you are afraid,--when your sensitiveness makes you afraid. I admire
all those qualities, but it isn't their intrinsic worth that makes me
love them. I love them because they're the things I know you by. I can't
be mistaken about them because I've felt them. Just as I've felt your
hands and your mouth and your hair. Well, then, whatever your days have
been, one day after another, they have in the end produced you sitting
there as you sit now. Whatever your--ingredients are they're your
ingredients. The total works out to you. Whereas my illusions work out to
nothing better than my little image of the Dumb Princess."

"Would it surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? I
mean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legs
off a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I
needn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way to be
kind to me?"

He smiled. "I can imagine your being cruel to a sentimentalist," he said.