Part 204

"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand there staring at me and you don't care a damn."

"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."

"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two children."

"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.

"Jinny--that ought never to have happened. You should have left that to the other women."

"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."

"You are----"

"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."

"My God. I don't care what you are."

He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in her supernatural self-possession.

"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."

"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way. This--this is different."

She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her--as by fire.

"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny--if I only wanted you for myself--but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you didn't suffer----"

"I'm not suffering."

"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all that."

"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."

"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."

"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not--not as you want me to."

He smiled. "How do you think I want you to?"

"Well--you know."

"I know that I care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or whether you care or not, so long as I can put a stop to that brutality."

"There isn't any brutality. I've got everything a woman can want."

"You've got everything any other woman can want."

She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."

"For heaven's sake be honest. What is the use of lying, to me of all people? Don't I know how happy you are?"

"But I am--I am, George. It's only this horrid, devilish thing that's been tacked on to me----"

"That beautiful, divine thing that God made part of you, the thing that you should have loved and made sacrifices to--if there were to have been sacrifices--the thing you've outraged and frustrated, and done your best to destroy, in your blind, senseless lust for what you call happiness. You've no right to make It suffer."