are indifferent to life. Indeed it is not fair. I am what I am. You may hate me or love me, but it is me. I am hard, I dare say, without the power to love; that is me too. And you say to me, “ Alter that, please, and become exceedingly tender and devoted.” And because I don't—ah, there is your mistake; it is because I can't. I could pray and think and agonize, and yet not add an inch to my stature; and do you think, then, it is likely that I could alter what is so vastly more me than my height?'
' Ah, I don't blame you,' said he, ' and I don't saddle you with any responsibility.'
' But if I loved you, you would care to live.'
' Yes; but I don't say that it is your fault that you don't. That would be interfering in your life—a thing which I am deprecating in regard to my own.'
She made a hopeless gesture with her hands.
' We are talking in a circle,' she said. ' Leave it for a moment; I have something else to tell you.'
He sat very upright in his chair, grasping the arms in his hands, feeling that he knew for certain what this was.
' You mean you are going to marry Harold Bilton?'
' No, I mean exactly the opposite; I mean that I am not.'
He dropped the cigarette he had just lit into the fireplace. With her woman's quickness, she instantly saw the symbolical application of this, and, with her passion for analysis, could not resist casting a fly, as it were, over it. She pointed to the grate.
' You have dropped your cigarette,' she said.
He looked at her for one half-second, and then, with rather slower-moving mind, recalled what he had said about not smoking any more.
' Yes, the doctors told me not to,' he said, feeling again the thrill of even this infinitesimal piece of fencing with her. ' They said it was a bad habit for me.'
She got up.
