“It’s almost as if you tried to insult me with my infidelity,” she murmured. “It’s as if, already, you had no respect for me because you know I am unfaithful. Take care, Bevis, for, after all, I may get over you.”
“And I may get over you,” he said, looking not at her, but at the fire and slightly wagging his remaining foot, crossed over the artificial knee.
She was very silent at that, and, shame deepening and anger dropping (it wasn’t anger against her; she must know that) he glanced up at her and found her gaze still on him.
“My dear,” he muttered, smiling wryly, “you stick your needles too deeply into my heart. What’s sport to you is death to me.—No; I don’t mean that.—All I really mean is that we mustn’t be like children in a nursery slapping at each other. You’re as unlikely to get over me as I am to get over you, and I ask you, in deep seriousness, to accept that fact with all its implications. There it is and what are you going to do with it and with me?”
She had now risen from her seat and walked away from him, vaguely, and she went toward the third window and stood looking out.
She stood there a long time, without moving, and, remembering what she had said to him of it the other day, and of her fear, a discomfort—yet, comparatively, it was a comfort to feel it after their personal dispute—stirred him, so that, rising, with a sigh, he followed her, and, as he had done the other day, looked out over her shoulder at the cedar, the fountain, and the white fritillaries in their narrow beds. He saw from her fixed face that she had forgotten her fear of the harmless scene. Her gaze, with its new, cold grief, was straight before her.
“Tony; dear Tony,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She did not move or look at him.
“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s leave this place. It’s bad for us both. Sell it. Give it to Miss Latimer. Chuck it all, Tony, and start a new life with me. Chuck the whole ghoulish business of Malcolm and his feelings and your own infidelity. It has nothing to do with love and heaven; really it hasn’t. You’ll see it yourself some day. Let’s go away at once, darling, and get married.” The urgency of what he now saw as escape was suddenly so strong in him that he really meant it, really planned, while he spoke, the Southern flight; Tony deposited at her safe London house that very evening and the license bought next day. Why not? Wasn’t it the only way with her? As long as she was allowed to hesitate, her feet would remain fixed in this quagmire.
She hardly heard his words; he saw that as she turned her eyes on him; but she heard his ardour and it had broken down her withdrawal.
“I’m so frightened, Bevis,” she murmured. “You don’t understand. You are so bitter; so cruel. You frighten me more than I can tell you. I seemed to see, just now, when you said that, about getting over me, that I should lose your love, and his love, too; that that would be my punishment.”