“No,” she said scornfully. “You are a fox, a nice, cunning fox, with a gift for deception. That’s what you are. Why don’t you say something?” she went on, as he kept an embarrassed silence.
“Vera, there are weapons to be used against wolves, for me, to go away; for you, not to go down there,” he said, pointing to the precipice.
“Tell me how to prevent myself from going there. Teach me, since you are my mentor, how not to go. You first set the house on fire, and then talk of leaving it. You sing in praise of passion, and then....”
“I meant another kind of passion. Where both parties to it are honourable, it means the supreme happiness in life, and its storms are full of the glow of life....”
“And where there is no dishonour, no precipice yawns? I love, and am loved, yet passion has me in its jaws. Tell me what I should do.”
“Confess all to Grandmother,” whispered Raisky, pale with terror, “or permit me to talk to her.”
“To shame me and ruin me? Who told me I need not obey her?”
“At one moment you are on the point of telling your secret, at another you hide behind it. I am in the dark, and feel my way in uncertainty. How can I, when I do not know the whole truth, diagnose the case?”
“You know what is wrong with me? Why do you say you are in the dark. Come,” she said, leading him into the moonlight. “See what is wrong with me.”
He stood transfixed with terror and pity. Pale, haggard, with wild eyes and tightly pressed lips, this was quite another Vera. Strands of hair were loose from beneath her hood, and fell in gipsy-like confusion over her forehead and temples, and covered her eyes and mouth with every quick movement she made. Her shoulders were negligently clad in a satin wrap trimmed with swansdown, held in place by a loosely tied knot of silk.
“Well,” she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes. “What has happened to the beauty whose praise you sang?”
“Vera,” he said, “I would die for you. Tell me how I may serve you.”
“Die!” she exclaimed. “Help me to live. Give me that beautiful passion which sheds its glorious light over the whole of life. I see no passion but this drowning tiger passion. Give me back at least my old strength, you, who talk of going to my Grandmother to place her and me on the same bier. It is too late to tell me to go no more to the precipice.”