He paused, standing behind her. "I don't think I get your idea."
"No, probably not. You couldn't without knowing what it all used to mean to me."
"Used to mean?"
"Yes, Thor; used to mean in a way that it doesn't now, and never can any more."
There was pain in his voice as he said, "That's hard, Lois—damnably hard."
"I know, Thor dear. I wouldn't say it if I hadn't made up my mind that I must—that I ought to. I've had a great shock—which has been in its way a great humiliation—but I could go on keeping it to myself if I hadn't come to the conclusion that it's best for you to know. Men are so slow to fathom what their wives are thinking of—"
"Well, then, tell me."
She turned slowly round from her contemplation of the stars, a hand on each side grasping the low rail against which she leaned. The spangles on a scarf over her bare shoulders glittered iridescently in the light streaming from her room. Of Thor she could discern little more than the whiteness of his face and of his evening shirt-front from the obscurity in which he kept himself. A minute or more elapsed before she went on.
"You see, Thor, I didn't fall in love with you first of all for your own sake; it was because—because I thought you'd fallen in love with me. That's a sort of confession, isn't it? It may be something I ought to be ashamed of, and perhaps I am—a little. But you'd understand how it could happen if you were to realize what it was to me that a man should fall in love with me at all."
He tried to interrupt her, but she insisted on going on in her own way. "I wasn't attractive. I never had been. During the years when I was going out I never received what people call attentions—not from any one. I don't say that I didn't suffer on account of it. I did—but I'd begun to take the suffering philosophically. I'd made up my mind that no one would ever care for me, and I was getting used to the idea—when—when you came."