He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he understood.
Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave me! You will not abandon me!”
“I cannot—stay with you.”
“You win my heart—humiliate me,—see that I’m yours—only yours,—and then cast me off!”
“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to let me take you with me?”
“A target for the world!”
“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all—all; but what else is there—unless I leave you?”
She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue—I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”
“You despise me; you think me wicked—because I can’t have such horrible courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like that—cut off from everything—and not be degraded in the end.”