"Oh, keep quiet. What does it matter? I don't mind your knowing. I didn't choose to love you. I don't respect you a great deal or admire you in many ways. You're so young, so undeveloped, like a baby. Stop staring like a frightened child. It doesn't matter, I tell you. It doesn't matter."
And, in spite of himself, Roger felt that it did not really matter so very much. Katya, the Russian Jewess, with her squat body, her strange foreign past, was a being of another world, as she stood there talking of volcanoes and white ashes and souls that melted in their own fire.
If she had been of his own race, his own age—but no woman of his age and race would have said those things, would have thought them, would have felt them. Disgust rose against his will, disgust seated deep in the past of his people, disgust of flagrant confession like this.
Katya smiled, a twisted smile of pity for the feeling in him. His lips moved to deny it, but against the penetration of Katya's knowledge, the falsehood died.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, and knew that it sounded like Anne regretting the pain and sorrow of the world.
"You needn't be. I'm not. Can't you stop staring and trying to pretend?"
"Yes," Roger snapped, angry now with her and with himself, "when you stop pretending too. You talk of melting fire and volcanoes and yet you say it doesn't matter. It must matter. It——"
"It doesn't matter—as you mean. You understand nothing at all. Will you please go away?"
Roger's head dropped and he turned from her.
Her whisper followed. "Please forget. You can if you try because it really doesn't matter—to you." The last words were so low and Roger already so far across the loft that he did not hear them. He went without looking back.