"Forgive me," he murmured. "I can't touch you—here—now—with that look in your eyes. You are right."
"I must send you away," she continued, "because I want you to stay so terribly much—because it's all a false position for us both.... Do you remember what Ira said about losing something that was pulled out ... 'by the roots, like'?... The time has come for that Stuart, dear ... the roots are taking too strong a hold ... they must be torn out."
"Do I mean as much as that to you?"
"You mean so much—that everything else in life means nothing.... You mean so much that I compare all others with you to their injustice ... so much that I follow the glow of your cigar at night when you are walking ... that I watch the light in your window before I go to bed ... that I wake up with the thought that you are in the house ... that I think of you ... want you ... in a way I have no right to think and want."
"Conscience," he began, gripping his hands at his back and schooling his syllables so sternly that, in what seemed to him his hour of Gethsemane, he spoke with a sort of unedged flatness, "your semblance of success has been splendid, magnificent. Until to-night I believed absolutely that you no longer cared for me—and that you were happy.
"From the first I had seen in this marriage a certainty of disaster ... but when I came here I found a succession of bewildering surprises. These surprises entirely blinded me to the truth. Your serene bearing had every mark of genuineness, but there were other things, too—things beyond your control. The very place was transformed. Eben Tollman himself was really another man. His manner was no longer that of the bigot. He had learned the art of smiling."
Conscience shook her head.
"That is only another reason why you must go away, Stuart. Eben has always been the soul of generosity to me. He hates from the core of his heart these changes of which you speak. He has tolerated them only because I wanted them. With you here I can't be just to him. I contrast the little characteristics in him that grate on me and annoy me with the qualities in you that set me eagerly on fire. I tell you it's all unjust and it's all my fault."