She stood in the doorway until he had lit it.
“Come in, Kate,” he said, “let me give you something. I think there is some milk, certainly I have some cake, come in, Kate, or do you drink beer, I have beer, come in, I’ll make you something hot.”
But Kate only took her bicycle. “I ought to have been home hours ago,” she said darkly, wheeling it outside and lighting the lantern. He watched her silently as she dabbed the wick, the pallor of her hands had never appeared so marked.
“Let’s be kind to each other,” he said, detaining her, “don’t go, dear Kate.”
She pushed the bicycle out into the road.
“Won’t you see me again?” he asked as she mounted it.
“I am always seeing you,” she called back, but her meaning was dark to him.
“Faugh! The devil! The fool!” He gurgled anathemas as he returned to his cottage. “And me too! What am I?”
But no mortal man could ever love a woman of that kind. She did not love him at all, had never loved him. Then what was it she did love? Not her virtue—you might as well be proud of the sole of your foot; it was some sort of pride, perhaps the test of her virtue that the conflict between them provoked, the contest itself alone alluring her, not its aim and end. She was never happier than when having led him on she thwarted him. But she would find that his metal was as tough as her own.
Before going to bed he spent an hour in writing very slowly a letter to Kate, telling her that he felt they would not meet again, that their notions of love were so unrelated, their standards so different. “My morals are at least as high as yours though likely enough you regard me as a rip. Let us recognize then,” he wrote concludingly, “that we have come to the end of the tether without once having put an ounce of strain upon its delightful but never tense cord. But the effort to keep the affair down to the level at which you seem satisfied has wearied me. The task of living down to that assured me that for you the effort of living up to mine would be consuming. I congratulate you, my dear, on coming through scatheless and that the only appropriate condolences are my own—for myself.”