“Don’t try that. It wouldn’t. She’s beyond all help but one. So I am here to put it to you.”
The still, hot day encompassed their shadow and with its quiet made more intense Grainger’s sense of his own passion—passion and its negation, the stress between the two. Their words, though they spoke so quietly, seemed to fill the world.
“I am sorry,” Gavan said; “I can do nothing.”
Grainger beat at the tree.
“You love her.”
“Not as she must be loved. I only want her, when I am selfish. When I think for her I have no want at all.”
“Give her your selfishness.”
“Ah, even that fades. That’s what I found out. I can’t count on my selfishness. I’ve tried to do it. It didn’t work.”
Grainger turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; these moments under the yew-tree, that white figure with its pale smile, its comprehending gravity confronting him, would count in his life, he knew, among its most racking memories.
“I consider you a madman,” he now said.