“You make me feel—as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,” he said slowly.
The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins.
“I can scarcely believe they are me,” he said. “If they rose up and refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren’t they beautiful?”
He looked, with a faint smile, at Siegmund.
Siegmund glanced from the stranger’s to his own hands, which lay curved on the sea-wall as if asleep. They were small for a man of his stature, but, lying warm in the sun, they looked particularly secure in life. Instinctively, with a wave of self-love, he closed his fists over his thumbs.
“I wonder,” said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, “that she can’t see it; I wonder she doesn’t cherish you. You are full and beautiful enough in the flesh—why will she help to destroy you, when she loved you to such extremity?”
Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man, with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly.
“Fools—the fools, these women!” he said. “Either they smash their own crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands. Look at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick with compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold up by itself. I am very sorry.”
All at once he stopped. The bitter despair in his tone was the voice of a heavy feeling of which Siegmund had been vaguely aware for some weeks. Siegmund felt a sense of doom. He la.ughed, trying to shake it off.
