'Don't idealise me.'
The words were curt, the tone hard; there was no appearance of joking about him. There was a dreary disheartened sadness on his face, as of a man who struggled always and struggled in vain, who was suffering some defeat that shamed him. He had come near to her; she reached out her hand and touched his.
'Don't look like that,' she begged. 'I don't know why it is, and you make me more unhappy.'
He turned a sudden glance on her; their eyes met full for an instant; then both turned away. But the look that passed between them had held something new; it made a difference to them; it seemed in some sort to change the feeling of the dingy room. Their eyes had spoken of a possibility which had suddenly come into the minds of both and had surprised the chance of expression before they could hinder it. Henceforward it must at least be common ground with them that the unhappiness of each was a matter of deep concern to the other. But both crushed down the impulse and the longing to which that knowledge seemed naturally to give birth. Trix was not penitent; Airey's battle still ended in defeat. Their pretence was against them. She was of the rich. How could he bear to change his life for hers? She looked round the dingy room. Was this the existence to which she must come, a woman ruined, and content with these four walls? They were not boy and girl, that the mere thought of love could in a moment sweep all obstacles away. Each felt chains whereof the other knew nothing. It was not hope that filled them, but rather the forlorn sense of loss—that for them, as they were, such a thing could not be; and they were ashamed to own that the idea of it had been interchanged between them.
Trix ended the constrained silence that had followed on the speech of eyes.
'Well, we must take the world as we find it,' she said with a little sigh. 'At least I've tried to make it what I wanted, and, as you see, without success.' She rose to go, but rose reluctantly.
'Is it ourselves or the world?' he asked.
'We're the world, I suppose, like other people, aren't we? I don't feel too good to belong to it!'
'If we're a bit of it, we ought to have more to say to it,' he suggested, smiling again.
Trix shook her head.