She pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has changed into heartbreaking dread at Eugene's bid, loses all power of concealing his anxiety. Eugene, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle.
MORELL (in a suffocated voice—the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish). Candida!
MARCHBANKS (aside, in a flash of contempt). Coward!
CANDIDA (significantly). I give myself to the weaker of the two.
Eugene divines her meaning at once: his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it.
MORELL (bowing his head with the calm of collapse). I accept your sentence, Candida.
CANDIDA. Do you understand, Eugene?
MARCHBANKS. Oh, I feel I'm lost. He cannot bear the burden.
MORELL (incredulously, raising his bead with prosaic abruptness). Do you mean, me, Candida?
CANDIDA (smiling a little). Let us sit and talk comfortably over it like three friends. (To Morell.) Sit down, dear. (Morell takes the chair from the fireside—the children's chair.) Bring me that chair, Eugene. (She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next Morell, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.) You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters and successful brothers of yours were your mother's and father's pets: how miserable you were at Eton: how your father is trying to starve you into returning to Oxford: how you have had to live without comfort or welcome or refuge, always lonely, and nearly always disliked and misunderstood, poor boy!