He straightened, they faced each other in silence. After a moment she spoke again, looking down, her hands tremblingly picking at her handkerchief.
“I was so happy about it. It was the sign of your renewed love. I thought we could build a little wing on the cottage, and have a nurse.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “I thought it might be a little girl, and that you would love her better than the boy. I'll come later, dear, if you say so, but I can't come now.” She sank into her chair, her head drooping. He, too, sat down, too dazed by this new development to find his way for a minute through its implications.
“I'm sorry, Mary,” he said at last, dully. “I don't want a little girl. If she could be put away somewhere till she were grown, I should not mind. But to live like this all through one's youth, with a house, and servants, and people calling, and the place cluttered up with babies—I don't think I can do that, possibly.”
She was frankly crying now. “But, dear one, can't we compromise? After this baby is born, I'll give up the house. We'll live in France—I'll travel with you a little. That will help, won't it?”
He sighed. “I suppose so. We shall have to think out some scheme. But the ghastly part is that we shall both have to be content with half measures. You want one thing of life, Mary, I another. No amount of self-sacrifice on either side alters that fact. We married, strangers, and it's taken us a year and a half to find it out. My fault, of course. I wanted love and beauty, and I got it—I didn't think of the cost, and I didn't think of you. I was just a damned egotistical male, I suppose.” He laughed bitterly. “My father wanted a wife, and he got the burning heart of a rose. I—I never wanted a wife, I see that now, I wanted to snare the very spirit of life and make it my own—you looked a vessel fit to carry it. But you were just a woman like the rest. We've failed each other, that's all.”
“Oh, Stefan,” she cried through her tears, “I've tried so hard. But I was always the same—just a woman. Only—” her tears broke out afresh—“when you married me, I thought you loved me as I was.”
He looked at her, transfixed. “My God,” he whispered, “that's what I heard my mother say more than twenty years ago. What a mockery—each generation a scorn and plaything for the high Gods! Well, we'll do the best we can, Mary. I'm utterly a pagan, so I'm not quite the inhuman granite my Christian father was. Don't cry, dear.” He stooped and kissed her, and she heard his light, wild steps pass through the room and out into the night. She sat silent, amid the ruins of her nest.