“Your feelings,” Riatt began, rather contemptuously, but she stopped him.
“No,” she said, “you shan’t say what you were going to. My feelings, my feelings for you. You’ve told me that you did not love me, that you despised me, that you did love me, but you’ve never asked how I felt to you.”
“But you’ve made it so clear. You felt that, in default of anything else, I would do.”
She leaned across the table and looked at him gravely. “Max,” she said, “I love you.”
He made no motion, not even one of contempt, and so she got up, and coming round the table, she knelt down beside him and put her arms tightly about him. Still he did not move, except that his hands, which had been hanging at his sides, now gripped the edges of the chair with the rigidity of iron, and he said in a voice which sounded even in his own ears like that of a total stranger:
“What folly this is, Christine!”
“Why is it folly?”
“If you had said this six weeks ago, while I still had enough money to—”
