"Oh, I don't understand you!"
"No? Well, I didn't understand Godfrey. But in your case it doesn't matter. Why should you want to? You can all put me out of your thoughts from to-day."
"I can't!" cried Amy; "I shall never be able to!" Suddenly she came over to Winnie, and, standing before her, rather awkwardly, burst into tears. "How can you be so hard?" she moaned. "Don't you see that I'm terribly unhappy for you? But it's hopeless to try to tell you. You're so—so hard. And I've got to go back home, where they'll be——"
Winnie supplied the word—"Jubilant? Yes." She frowned. "You cry, and I don't—it is rather funny. I wonder if I shall cry when you've gone!"
"Oh, do you love him, or don't you?"
Winnie's brows were raised again. In view of what had occurred that day, of the sudden revelation of Godfrey, of the abrupt change his act had wrought in her relations to him, the question seemed to imply an unreal simplicity of the emotions, a falsely uncomplicated contrast between two states of feeling, standing distantly over against one another. Such a conception in no way corresponded with her present feelings about Godfrey Ledstone. The man she loved had done the thing she could not forgive—did she love him? Yet if she did not love him, why could she not forgive him? Unless she loved him, it was small matter that he should be ashamed and run away. But if he were ashamed and ran away, how could she love? Love and contempt, tenderness and repulsion, seemed woven into one fabric of intricate, almost untraceable pattern. How could she describe that to Amy Ledstone?
"I suppose I love my Godfrey, but he seems not to be the same as yours. I can't put it better than that. And you love yours, and not mine. I think that's all we can say about it."
Amy had her complications of feeling too. She dried her eyes, mournfully saying, "That's not true about me. I like yours best—if I know what you mean. He was a man, anyhow. But then I know it's wicked to feel like that."
Winnie looked up at her. "Of course you must think it wicked—I quite see that—but you do understand more than I thought," she said. "And you won't think I'm abusing him? It wouldn't seem wicked to me at all—if I'd happened on the right man. But I didn't. That's all. And this way of ending it seems somehow to—to defile it all. The end spoils it all. That seems to me shamefully unfair. He had a right to go, but he had no right to be ashamed. And he is ashamed, and almost makes me ashamed. I could almost hate him for it."
"We've made him ashamed. You must hate us."