"I am glad," she said, "you deserve it."
She had given her eyes to him almost unconsciously, and their look was
like a cord which drew them slowly to each other. His pulses hammered
in his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees,
and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces
which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her
eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact
of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization
has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the
sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only
the present, crowned, radiant, and sweet to the senses as the garlands
of wild grape around which the golden bees hung in a cloud. For an
instant only the vision held him; then the rush of desire faded
slowly, and some unconquerable instinct, of which he had been almost
unconscious, asserted its supremacy in his brain. The ghosts of dead
ancestors who had adhered to law at the cost of happiness; the iron
skeleton of an outgrown and yet indelibly implanted creed; the tenacity
of the racial structure against which his individual impulses had
rebelled--these things, or one of these things, proved in the end
stronger than the appeal of his passion.
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