While he paused, words that were quite different from those he intended to use presented themselves.
"I've made you my standard ever since I saw you.

I've dreamt about you; I've thought of nothing but you; you represent to me the only reality in the world." His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them, made it appear as if he addressed some person who was not the woman beside him, but some one far away.
"And now things have come to such a pass that, unless I can speak to you openly, I believe I shall go mad.

I think of you as the most beautiful, the truest thing in the world," he continued, filled with a sense of exaltation, and feeling that he had no need now to choose his words with pedantic accuracy, for what he wanted to say was suddenly become plain to him.
"I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

Life, I tell you, would be impossible without you.

And now I want--" She had heard him so far with a feeling that she had dropped some material word which made sense of the rest.