He gets violently to his feet, his hands clenched, and makes again that savage, breaking action of his arms, and cries at her: "Temptation and sin and rubbish, rubbish, like that! Let it alone! If you don't love me, say so! If you're going to let me go, say so! Don't drag the Bible into it! If you don't love me, say so, say so, say so!"
"Arthur, you know I love you. You don't love me, dear!"
A last effort. A last control of his fury. He turns to her. "Essie, I can't live without you. Essie! Essie!"
"Oh, you couldn't love me to ask me to live in sin!"
That ends it. That expression—its beastly and vulgar piety, its common, vulgar phraseology—sweeps across his fury as in a rasping shudder of abhorrence. He breaks his fury out upon it. He bursts out: "By God, you're common, common! Do you think I'd marry you—you? What do you think you are? Who do you think I am? Marry you! Marry you! Let's get out of this! Let's go home, and you can tell your father and your mother!"
Return to life! Gone, gone! Lost, lost! He was shaking with hate and shaking with utter fury. He walked to the door and staggered as he walked and must stop and correct his direction as though he were drunken. At the door he turned to her and saw that she remained seated, leaning back against the window, her hands clasped. He cried: "Are you coming? Are you coming?"
She got up and came to him and went through the doorway before him and through the outer door. He slammed it behind him, and they passed out from Whitehouse and up the lane, and out upon the cliffs and turned along them homeward. Raining. He carried her cloak but did not offer it her. A wind blew gustily from off the land that frequently buffetted him, and her, and at whose buffettings and at the slippery foothold of the rain-swept grass he angrily exclaimed.
IV
She walked to seaward of him close along the cliff's edge. Here the cliff fell sharply a few feet, then overhung an outward lap of gorse and bracken, sheer then to the sands. Once as they pressed and slipped their way along, he caught her eyes. She was crying. He sneered: "You can tell your father and mother!"
She caught her breath to answer him: "As if—I should!"