At this Christina broke into dreadful sobs. She did not move towards her friend, but she stretched her clasped hands out towards her and said, while her voice, half-strangled, came in gasps: "Milly—Milly—Have you forgotten everything?—All the years when we were so happy together?—When he was nothing to you?—For all these years, Milly—nothing—nothing.—How can you care—suddenly—like this—when you have almost hated him for so long?—You know what you said, in the winter, Milly—that you would not care if he were to die."
Milly's eyes had hardened. She moved towards the door.
"Milly!" Christina's cry arrested her. She had to stop and listen, though her hand was on the door. "Wait! Forgive me!—I don't know what I am saying!—And it was true! It was! You did not care!—Oh don't be cruel to me. I shall die if you leave me. What have I done that you should change so?"
"You have done nothing, Christina," said Milly in a voice of schooled forbearance. "It is I who have changed, and been cruel, first to Dick and then to you. I am a shallow, feeble creature, but the shallowness was in thinking that I couldn't love my husband—not in loving him now. I don't want the things you and I had together. I only want the stupid, simple things that he could have given me. I want someone to be in love with me. That is it, I think. I am the most usual, common sort of woman, who must have someone in love with her and be in love. And I am in love with Dick. And I am too unhappy to think of anyone but myself."
Christina stood with her face covered. Convulsive sobs shook her.
"Good-bye," said Milly.
She did not reply. She moved her head a little, in negation? acquiescence? appeal?—Milly did not know. And since Christina still said nothing, she turned the handle softly and left her.
Milly went down to Chawlton. In the country, alone, she could sit and look at her life and at the wreckage she had made in it without feeling that another's eyes were watching her. It pained her, when she could turn her mind from the humiliation of her own misery, to see how completely all love for poor Christina had died from her, to see how the perhaps crude and elemental love had killed the delicate, derivative affection. It was even sadder to realise that under the superficial pain lay a deep indifference. She was very sorry for Christina. She had accepted Christina's life and used it, and now, through the strange compulsion of fate, she must cut herself away from it, even if that were to leave it broken and bleeding. For if she were to remain sorry for Christina, to look back at her with pity and compunction, she must not see her. Words, glances, silences of Christina's rankled in her, and when she thought of them she could not forgive her. Christina had seen too much, understood too much. She was a blight upon her love, a menace to her tragic memory of it. Under everything, deeper than anything else in her feeling about Christina, was a dim repulsion and dislike.
That Christina had submitted showed in her letters, for Milly, before many days had passed, wrote kindly and mildly, in the tone which, for the future, she intended to use towards Christina. Milly surprised herself with her own calm ruthlessness. She found that the gentle and the cowardly can, when roused, be more cruel than the harsh and fearless. Her letters to Christina were serene and impersonal. They recognised a bond, but they defined its limits. They might have been letters written to a former governess, with whom her relation had been kindly but not fond. They never mentioned her husband's name, nor alluded, even indirectly, to her mistimed love; and to ask Christina's forgiveness again for her unjust arraignment of her would have been to allude indirectly to it.