"And I," said Mr. Spenlove, after some business with a reluctant match, "was not prepared, just then, to deny it. It would be absurd and misleading to speak of a community of interest as love, yet we are driven to discover some reason for what we call love apart from the appeal of sex. Otherwise a pretty promiscuous kettle of fish! Where does it begin and out of what does it grow? I'm not asking because I imagine I shall get any answer. I'm inclined to believe the origin of love is as obscure as that of life itself. I put the thought into words, because at that moment, with that girl beside me, with the whole mundane contraption of existence obliterated by a damp, foggy darkness, with the moisture dripping hurriedly from invisible trees, and the immediate future rendered ominous by Captain Macedoine's remarks, I felt a conviction that I was closer to the solution of the problem than I had ever been before. Or since, for that matter. Closer, I say. I was aware of it without being actually able to take hold of it. Nor did I try to take hold of it. I was still in that condition of mucilaginous uncertainty toward my emotions in which most of us English seem to pass our days. Foreigners are led to imagine we really take no interest in the subject of love, for example, we are so scared of any approach to the flames of desire. We compromise by floating down some economic current into the broad river of matrimony. We have a genius for emotional relinquishment. We--you--are born compromisers. We are so sure that we shall never know the supreme raptures of passion that most of us never do know them. And in any case we are so rattled by the mere proximity of love that we never seem to get any coherent conception of its nature. And I was not much of an exception. I have no supreme secret to impart to you. As I have said, I am _par excellence_ a super in the play. For a few memorable moments I was entrusted with the part of a principal. It was not my fault, after all, that nothing came of it. I sometimes wonder what _would_ have come of it, had not her sinister destiny intervened....
"And then suddenly our feet struck timber that rang hollow and I made out a slender jetty running into the fog. The girl moved ahead, drawing me after her as she scanned the water with her other hand shading her eyes. For a moment she stood listening and then she uttered a melodious contralto shout for someone named '_Makri!_' I can recall, as I repeat the word, the name of that obscure and unknown boatman, the very timbre of her voice, the poise of her form, and the firm flexure of her fingers on mine. And for that moment, as we stood waiting and the boat came slowly and silently toward us with the standing figure of the oarsman lost in the higher fog, I had an extraordinary impression, clear and diminutive as a vignette, that I loved her and that she, in some mysterious fashion, could love me without jeopardizing her own destiny. A folly, of course; but I insist it gave me an inkling, that brief illumination, of the actual nature of love."