I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.
“I don’t blame you for despising me,” Dinky-Dunk said, out of the silence, once more in control of himself.
“I was thinking of her,” I explained. And then I found the courage to look into my husband’s face. “No, Dinky-Dunk, I don’t despise you,” I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. “But I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it’s selfishness, it seems to me, which costs us so much, in the end.”
He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.
“That’s the only glimmer of hope I have,” he surprised me by saying.
“But why hope from that?” I asked.
“Because you’re so utterly without selfishness,” that deluded man cried out to me. “You were always that way, but I didn’t have the brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to—to her.” He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish floor-tiles. “I knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn’t. But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had to. And that makes me feel that I’m not fit to touch you, that I’m not even fit to walk on the same ground with you!”
I tried my best to remain judicial.
“But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn’t being quite fair to either of us,” I protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn’t see the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words that I’d waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene I’d again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman’s imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his soul, had let that grit grind away life’s delicate surfaces without even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better than the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he had been saved for me. He was there within arm’s reach of me, battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.
“Take me back, Babushka,” I could hear his shaken voice imploring. “I don’t deserve it—but I can’t go on without you. I can’t! I’ve had enough of hell. And I need you more than anything else in this world!”