The patient words, so unlike Eppie in their patience, the downcast eyes, were a torch to his exasperation.
“I can take it, then—the right?” he said. “I am near enough to say the truth and to ask it, Eppie?”
She rose and walked away from him.
With the sense of hot pursuit that sprang up in him he felt himself as ruthless as a boy, pushing through the thickets of reticence, through the very supplications of generosity, to the nest of her secret. It was not joy he sought, but his own pain, and to see it clearly, finally. He must see it. And when Eppie, her back to him, leaning her arm on the mantel and looking down into the empty cavern of the great chimney-place, answered, accepting all his implications, “Gavan hasn’t found any happiness,” he said, “He finds all that he asks for.”
It was as if he had wrenched away the last bough from the nest, and the words gave him, with their breathless determination, an ugly feeling of cruel, breaking malignity.
Eppie’s face was still turned from him so that he could not see how she bore the rifling, but in the same dulled and gentle voice she answered, “He doesn’t ask what you do.”
At that Grainger’s deepest resentment broke out.
“Doesn’t ask your love? No, I suppose not. The man’s a mollusk,—a wretched, diseased creature.”
He had struck at last a flash from her persistent gentleness. She faced him, and he saw that she tried to smile over deep anger.
“You say that because Gavan is not in love with me? It is a sick fancy that sees every man not in love with me as sick too.”