The egotism of it, the vulgarity of it made me frantic. I was ashamed of myself, I was ashamed of him, and I felt as if nothing would make him see the truth. Never in my whole life have I spoken to any human being as I did to him. I felt like a raging termagant, but he would not see.
"Stop!" I cried out. "If you had never had a wife, I couldn't care for you. I thought I loved you, and perhaps I did; but all that is over, and over forever."
"You've said you'd love me always," he retorted.
Some outer layer of courtesy seemed to have cracked and fallen from him, and to have left an ugly and vulgar nature bare. The pathos of it came over me. The pity that a man should be capable of so exposing his baser self struck me in the midst of all my indignation. I could not help a feeling, moreover, that he had somehow a right to reproach me with having changed. Thinking of it now in cooler blood I cannot see that since he has left me to marry another woman he has any ground for reproaching me; but somehow at the moment I felt guilty.
"George," I answered, "I thought I was telling the truth; I didn't understand myself."
The change in his face showed me that this way of putting it had done more to convince him than any direct denial. His whole manner altered.
"You don't mean," he pleaded piteously, "you've stopped caring for me?"
I could only tell him that certainly I had stopped caring for him in the old way, and I begged him to go back to his wife. He said little more, and I was at last released from this horrible scene. All night I thought of it miserably or I dreamed of it more miserably still. That poor woman! What can I do for her? I hope I have not lost the power of influencing George, for I might use it to help her.