"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own sake, but for yours.
To men like you who have lived at the Front, life has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children; what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises come to all of us, when life grows desperate—when to be alone becomes intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden, because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity—and that's being compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual—of a high type like yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge. Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all
your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry had?"
He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing straight before him.
What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable, undignified, absurd—on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music. The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his passion for Terry was at an end.
When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room, with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress, sitting so
gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved that.
Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to him—that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall. Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung his idolatry on her.
But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.
His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no one else."