"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if you like, you can go below."
"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and know all the time that something sticks between us----"
He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had brought them together. Amid the dæmonic triumph and jubilation of the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman, had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged them in and hid them from each other.
"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one thing that sticks between us--the eternal difference in our points of view."
"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman----"
"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."
"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say, and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you----"
"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about _you_. I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me sure."
"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a certain kind of woman the way she wants to be loved. You can't help it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."
"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."
"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always will be, the same."
"Does it come to this--that if I had loved you then you would have loved me now?"
"You couldn't have loved me then. You were not that sort."
He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn't my fault. How the devil was I to see?"