"But if I have freedom, Amelia, you have conscience. I give you my freedom. In exchange, you give me your conscience." He spoke soberly. "Is that not so?"
She looked up into his face. "Perhaps, my dear."
"It is what I originally sought in you, you'll recall."
She smiled. "True."
"In combination, then, we give something to the world."
"Possibly." She returned to her tea-cups, lifting the tray. He sprang to open the door. "But does this world want what, together, we can give it?"
"It might need us more than it knows."
She darted him an intelligent look as he followed her into the kitchen. "Sometimes, Jherek Carnelian, I come close to suspecting that you have inherited your father's cunning."
"I do not understand you."
"You are capable of concocting the most convincing of arguments, on occasion. Do you deliberately seek to mollify me?"
"I stated only what was in my mind."
She put on a pinafore. She was thoughtful as she washed the tea-cups, handing them to him as each one was cleaned. Unsure what to do with them, he made them weightless so that they drifted up to the ceiling and bobbed against it.
"No," she said at last, "this world does not need me. Why should it?"
"To give it texture."
"You speak only in artistic terms."
"I know no others. Texture is important. Without it a surface quickly loses interest."
"You see morality only as texture?" She looked about for the cups, noted them on the ceiling, sighed, removed her pinafore.
"The texture of a painting is its meaning."
"Not the subject?"
"I think not. Morality gives meaning to life. Shape at any rate."
"Texture is not shape."
"Without texture the shape is barren."
"You lose me. I am not used to arguing in such terms."
"I am scarcely used to arguing at all, Amelia!"
They returned to the sitting room, but she would advance into the garden. He went with her. Many flowers sweetened the air. She had recently added insects, a variety of birds to sing in the trees and hedges. It was warm; the sun relaxed them both. They went hand-in-hand along a path between rose trellises, much as they had wandered once in their earliest days together. He recalled how she had been snatched from him, as he had been about to kiss her. A hint of foreboding was pushed from his mind. "What if these hedges were bare," he said, "if there was no smell to the roses, no colour to the insects, they would be unsatisfying, eh?"
"They would be unfinished. Yet there is a modern school of painting — was such a school, in my time — that made a virtue of it. Whistlerites, I believe they were called. I am not too certain."
"Perhaps the leaving out was meant to tell us something too, Amelia? What was important was what was absent."
"I don't think these painters said anything to that effect, Jherek. I believe they claimed to paint only what the eye saw. Oh, a neurotic theory of art, I am sure…"
"There! Would you deny this world your common sense? Would you let it be neurotic?"
"I thought it so, when first I came. Now I realize that what is neurotic in sophisticated society can be absolutely wholesome in a primitive one. And in many respects, I must say, your society shares much in common with some of those our travellers experienced when first landing upon South Sea islands. To be sinful, one must have a sense of sin. That is my burden, Jherek, and not yours. Yet, it seems, you ask me to place that burden on you, too. You see, I am not entirely selfish. I do you little good."
"You give meaning to my life. It would have none without you." They stood by a fountain, watching her goldfish swimming. There were even insects upon the surface of the water, to feed them.
She chuckled. "You can argue splendidly, when you wish, but you shall not change my feelings so quickly. I have already tried to change them myself for you. I failed. I must think carefully about my intentions."
"You consider me bold, for declaring myself while your husband is still in our world?"
"I had not quite considered it in those terms." She frowned. She drew away from him, moving around the pool, her dress dappled with bright spots of water from the fountain. "I believe you to be serious, I suppose. As serious as it is possible for you to be."
"Ah, you find me superficial." He was saddened.
"Not that. Not now."
"Then —?"
"I remain confused, Jherek."
They stood on opposite sides of the pool, regarding each other through the veil of falling silvery water. Her beauty, her auburn hair, her grey eyes, her firm mouth, all seemed more desirable than ever.
"I wish only to honour you," he said, lowering his eyes.
"You do so, already, my dear."
"I am committed to you. Only to you. If you wished, we could try to return to 1896…"
"You would be miserable there."
"Not if we were together, Amelia."
"You do not know my world, Jherek. It is capable of distorting the noblest intentions, of misinterpreting the finest emotions. You would be wretched. And I would feel wretched, also, to see one such as you transformed."
"Then what is to be the answer?"
"I must think," she said. "Let me walk alone for a while, my dearest."
He acknowledged her wish. He strode for the house, driving back the thoughts that suggested he would never see her again, shaking off the fear that she would be snatched from him, as she had been snatched once before, telling himself that it was merely association and that circumstances had changed. But how radically, he wondered, had they changed?
He reached the house. He closed the door behind him. He began to wander from room to room, avoiding only her apartments, the interior of which he had never seen, though he retained a deep curiosity about them, had often restrained an impulse to explore.
It came to him, as he entered his own bedroom and lay down upon the bed, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown, that perhaps all these new feelings were new only to him. Jagged, he felt sure, had known such feelings in the past — they had made him what he was. He vaguely recollected Amelia saying something about the son being the father, unwounded by the world. Did he grow more like Jagged? The thoughts of the previous night came back to him, but he refused to let them flourish. Before long, he had fallen asleep.
He was awakened by the sound of her footfall as she came slowly upstairs. It seemed to him that, on the landing, she paused at his door before her own door opened and she entered her rooms. He lay still for a little while, perhaps hoping that she would return. He got up, disseminating his night-clothes, naked as he listened; she did not come back. He used one of his power-rings to make a loose blouse and long kilt, in dark green. He left the bedroom and stood on the landing, hearing her moving about on the other side of the wall.
"Amelia?"
There was no reply.
He had grown tired of introspection. "I will return soon, my dear," he called.
Her voice was muffled. "Where do you go?"
"Nowhere."
He descended, passing through the kitchen and into the garden at the back, where he normally kept his locomotive. He boarded the craft, whistling the tune of Carrie Joan , feeling just a hint of nostalgia for the simpler days before he had met Amelia at the party given by the Duke of Queens. Did he regret the meeting? No.
The locomotive steamed into the sky, black, silver and gold now. He noticed how strange the two nearby scenes looked — the thatched house and its gardens, the lake of blood. They clashed rather than contrasted with each other. He wondered if she would mind if he disseminated the lake, but decided not to interfere.