The Lost World / Затерянный мир

“Why can’t you control yourself?[6 - to control yourself – держать себя в руках]”

“I can’t. It’s nature. It’s love.”

“Well, I have never felt it.”

“But you must… you, with your beauty, with your soul! Oh, Gladys, you were made for love! You must love!”

“One must wait till it comes.”

“But why can’t you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?”

“No it isn’t that,” she said with a smile. “It’s deeper.”

“My character?”

She nodded severely.

“What can I do, Gladys? Tell me, what’s wrong?”

“I’m in love with somebody else,” she said.

I jumped out of my chair.

“It’s nobody in particular,” she explained, laughing at the expression of my face: “only an ideal. I’ve never met the kind of man I mean.”

“Tell me about him. What does he look like?”

“Oh, he might look very much like you.”

“How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I don’t do? Just say the word… non-drinking, vegetarian, pilot, theosophist, superman.

I’ll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will tell me what would please you.”

She laughed at the flexibility of my character.

“Well, in the first place, I don’t think my ideal would speak like that,” said she. “He would be a harder man, not so ready to adapt himself to a girl. But, above all, he must be a man who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great experiences.

It is not a man that I should love, but the glories he had won because they would be reflected upon me!”

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm!

“But we don’t usually get the chance of great experiences… at least, I never had the chance. If I did, I should try to take it.”

“But chances are all around you. Remember that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia.

That was the kind of man I mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have envied her! That’s what I should like to be… envied for my man.”

“I’d have done it to please you.”

“But you shouldn’t do it just to please me. You should do it because you can’t help yourself,[7 - you can’t help yourself – ты ничего не можешь с собой поделать] because it’s natural to you.