“Warned you?”
“That I’d be miserable if I married a man I didn’t love.”
“Don’t you love him?”
She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing- table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self- sufficient–the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations–offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. “It’s rather hard on Owen, isn’t it, that you should have waited until now to tell him?”
She reflected a moment before answering. “I told him as soon as I knew.”
“Knew that you couldn’t marry him?”
“Knew that I could never live here with him.” She looked about the room, as though the very walls must speak for her.
For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.
“Yes—-” she said, and stood up.
Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.
“There–that for instance,” Sophy Viner said.
Darrow broke out: “It’s I who ought to go!”
She kept her small pale smile. “What good would that do any of us–now?”
He covered his face with his hands. “Good God!” he groaned. “How could I tell?”
“You couldn’t tell. We neither of us could.” She seemed to turn the problem over critically. “After all, it might have been YOU instead of me!”
He took another distracted turn about the room and coming back to her sat down in a chair at her side. A mocking hand seemed to dash the words from his lips. There was nothing on earth that he could say to her that wasn’t foolish or cruel or contemptible…
“My dear,” he began at last, “oughtn’t you, at any rate, to try?”
Her gaze grew grave. “Try to forget you?”
He flushed to the forehead. “I meant, try to give Owen more time; to give him a chance. He’s madly in love with you; all the good that’s in him is in your hands. His step-mother felt that from the first. And she thought–she believed—- ”
“She thought I could make him happy. Would she think so now?”
“Now…? I don’t say now. But later? Time modifies…rubs out…more quickly than you think…Go away, but let him hope…I’m going too–we’re going–” he stumbled on the plural–“in a very few weeks: going for a long time, probably. What you’re thinking of now may never happen. We may not all be here together again for years.”
She heard him out in silence, her hands clasped on her knee, her eyes bent on them. “For me,” she said, “you’ll always be here.”
“Don’t say that–oh, don’t! Things change…people change…You’ll see!”
“You don’t understand. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to forget–to rub out. At first I imagined I did; but that was a foolish mistake. As soon as I saw you again I knew it…It’s not being here with you that I’m afraid of–in the sense you think. It’s being here, or anywhere, with Owen.” She stood up and bent her tragic smile on him. “I want to keep you all to myself.”
The only words that came to him were futile denunciations of his folly; but the sense of their futility checked them on his lips. “Poor child–you poor child!” he heard himself vainly repeating.
Suddenly he felt the strong reaction of reality and its impetus brought him to his feet. “Whatever happens, I intend to go–to go for good,” he exclaimed. “I want you to understand that. Oh, don’t be afraid–I’ll find a reason. But it’s perfectly clear that I must go.”
She uttered a protesting cry. “Go away? You? Don’t you see that that would tell everything–drag everybody into the horror?”
He found no answer, and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. “What good would your going do? Do you suppose it would change anything for me?” She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. “I wonder what your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I’ve never really known-I suppose we don’t know much about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you’re thirsty?…I used to feel as if all of me was in the palm of your hand…”