frida had played high and yet she had won the game of life; that dangerous game which most women playing single-handed are bound to lose. she had won, [pg 355] but whether by apathy or care, by skill or divine chance, he could not tell. as to himself he was very certain; when he might have won her he did not care to win, now that he had lost her he would always care. that was just his way.
alone in the little hotel that looked over the harbor, left to the tyrannous company of his own thoughts, he made a desperate effort to understand her, to accept her point of view, to be, as she was, comprehensive and generous and just.
he believed every word she had ever said to him, for she was truth itself; he believed her when she said that she had loved him, that she loved him still. of course she loved him; but how?
they say that passion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. but frida's had shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal; and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole. other women before frida had loved the world too well; but for them the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. for frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. impossible to fix her part and place in it; the woman was so merged with the object of her desire. he, maurice durant, was as she had said a part of that world, but he was not the whole; he was not even the half, that half which for most women is more than the whole. from the first he had been to her the symbol of a reality greater than himself; she loved not him, but the world in him. and thus her love, like his own art, had missed the touch of greatness. it was neither the joy nor the tragedy of her life, but its one illuminating [pg 356] episode; or, rather, it was the lyrical prologue to the grand drama of existence.
he did her justice. it was not that she was changeable or capricious, or that her love was weak; on the contrary, its very nature was to grow out of all bounds of sex and mood and circumstance. its progress had been from maurice durant outward; from maurice, as the innermost kernel and heart of the world, to the dim verge, the uttermost margin of the world; and that by a million radiating paths. it was not that she left maurice behind her, for all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with the circumference. he saw himself diminished to a mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. for frida he had ceased to have any objective existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what the colonel would have called an abstraction. there was nothing for him to do but to accept the transcendent position.
thus, through all the tension of his soul, his intellect still struggled for comprehension.
meanwhile, from his window looking over the white-walled harbor, he could see the windward with all her sails spread, outward bound.
he watched her till there was nothing to be seen but her flying sails, till the sails were one white wing on a dim violet sea, till the white wing was a gray dot, indistinct on the margin of the world.
