"You told me that I might go! Where I pleased, when I pleased!"
He swung about and turned on her a face of whose expression in that dim, flickering light she could make nothing.
"You had your choice! You came back! Now I know something which I did not know before."
He began pacing up and down again, making the cabin's smallness further dwarfed by his great strides. He fascinated her; she watched him, and her fear, formless and nameless, grew until it seemed that it would choke her.
There was a boarded-up window. A thin slit of light showed.
Then, as once before, tingling with anger born of foreseen humiliation, she cried out:
"Not brute, but man," he told her sternly. "And, ever since the world was young, men, when they were men, claimed their mates and took and held them!"
Again for a long time he was silent. And then, on his feet, his arms thrown out, he cried in a strange voice:
He made strange mad music in her soul. She tried again to cry out: "I hate you!" She knew that still she was afraid of him, more afraid than ever. Yet he strode up and down and looked a young valiant god, and his golden voice found singing echoes within her soul and his wild extravagances awoke throbbing extravagances in her.... What can one know? What misdoubt? We are like babes in the dark. Of what can one be sure? Of the stars above?... Our hopes are like stars....
"I am no poet, though next to a strong fighting man I'd rather be a true poet than anything else God ever created! Were I a poet I'd build a song for you, girl! A song to ring through the eternal ages; going back to the roots of things when You and I were first You and I! It would be a song like one of the old troubadours', telling of great deeds and great loves only ... for you and I have never been the ones for cowardly littlenesses! I'd make a song to hang about the world's memory of you like a golden chain. And I'd carry on, having the poet's soul and vision, into ten thousand lives to come; down to the end of time when eternity is only at its beginnings!... But I am only plain Bruce Standing, a simple fighting man, and no poet; one who at best can but mouth the voicings of the true poets. So I can only pour all my heart and soul, girl, into my brief poem: I love you. I have always loved you! Always and always I shall love you!... And I'll crack any man's skull that so much as looks at you!"