“You mean you don’t?”
“Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and being loved.”
The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:
“Tell me just what you mean.”
“Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant.”
She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost him, and yet she was eternally his.
As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady himself. She thought he was going to faint.
“Vincent,” she said, “let me help you to the sofa.”
She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder, anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.
He smiled bitterly.