Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

34. CHAPTER XXXIV (continued)

"Of course, you must tell her," said Katharine, and now felt anxious for him to do what appeared to be necessary if he, too, were to hold his globe for a moment round, whole, and entire.

"I wish--I wish--" she sighed, for melancholy came over her and obscured at least a section of her clear vision. The globe swam before her as if obscured by tears.

"I regret nothing," said Ralph firmly. She leant towards him almost as if she could thus see what he saw. She thought how obscure he still was to her, save only that more and more constantly he appeared to her a fire burning through its smoke, a source of life.

"Go on," she said. "You regret nothing--"

"Nothing--nothing," he repeated.

"What a fire!" she thought to herself. She thought of him blazing splendidly in the night, yet so obscure that to hold his arm, as she held it, was only to touch the opaque substance surrounding the flame that roared upwards.

"Why nothing?" she asked hurriedly, in order that he might say more and so make more splendid, more red, more darkly intertwined with smoke this flame rushing upwards.

"What are you thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

"I was thinking of you--yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You've destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me--tell me from the beginning."

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then.

"But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn't seen you. Would you have gone to bed?"