I should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare.
She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she had always
believed to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged
to an ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with
elegant sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do
it, perhaps two, but the third-- Can we ever rise above nature or
sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon
St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she
not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom
of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame
me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its
destiny."

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a
giant barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah!
the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has
begun again," she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his
arm about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's
hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her,
and his hand trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was
level with hers now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All
her life she had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in
his eyes. She knew that that look had never shone for her before,