“No one asks her to forget him,” said Bevis. She could not drink her tea, but he passed his cup, blessing the bland ritual that made soft, sliding links in an encounter all harsh, had it been unaccompanied, with the embarrassment of their antagonism. “May I have another cup, please?” There was a malicious satisfaction, too, in falling back upon the ritual at such a moment. “With a little water?—I cared for Malcolm. I have no intention of forgetting him.”
Her eyes were still on him, and distraction, almost desperation, was working in her, for, though she took his cup as automatically as she had lifted her own, though she proceeded to fill it, it was, he noted with an amusement that almost expressed itself in a laugh—he knew that he was capable of feeling amusement at the most unlikely times and places!—with the boiling water only. She put in milk and sugar and handed it to him, unconscious of the absurdity.
“I did not mean in that sense,” she said.
“I should like to know what you do mean.” He drank his milk and water. “I should like to know where I am with you. Do you dislike me? Are you my enemy? Or is it merely that you are passionately opposed to remarriages?”
She rose as he asked his questions as if the closeness of his pursuit had become too intolerable. “I do not know you. How could I be your enemy? I only dislike you, because you make Antonia unhappy.”
“Would you like me if I made her happy?”
The pale glare was in her eyes as she faced him, her hands on the back of her chair. “You can never make her happy. Never. Never,” she repeated. “You can only mean unhappiness to her. If you care for her, if you have any real love for her, you will go away, now, at once, and leave her in peace.”
“So you say. So you think. It’s a matter of opinion. I don’t agree with you. I don’t believe it would be to leave her in peace. You forget that we’re in love with each other.” He, too, had risen, but in his voice, as he opposed her, there was appeal rather than antagonism. “Let us understand each other. Is it that you hate so much the idea of remarriages? Do you feel them to be infidelities?”
She had turned from him, but she paused now by the door, and it was as if, arrested by the appeal, she was willing to do justice to his mere need for enlightenment. “Not if people care more for some one else.”
Care more? He did not echo her phrase, but he meditated, and then, courageously, accepted it. “And if they can, you don’t hate it?”