His voice was chilling when he spoke. "It's very good of you to take such an interest in me. I ought to be gratified that you should think you know so much about me, and after so short an acquaintance—so very much more than I know about myself."
"But I don't think; I do know far more at this moment than you know about yourself." Her tones were calm and lazy, unembarrassed and pleasant. The red glow of the fire glinting on the silver tea-service seemed the reflection of her cheerfulness.
"If you're so certain that you know, you might tell me," he said stiffly.
"I know—— Do you mind if I smoke?" She leant forward while he held a match to her cigarette. "I know that you're an intensely lonely man. All men have to be lonely till they're thirty if they're going to get anywhere. They have no time to spare. You've had no time to spare for women—that's why you don't understand them. Women were for you a treat in store, until the war broke. Then suddenly you discovered that you had missed the most precious thing in life. You hadn't the time to be wise in your choice, so you turned to some one young and accessible. Her youth seemed to symbolize all that you coveted at the moment; it sym
bolized going on forever. You weren't really in love with her as an individual; you were in love with the thought of love and youth. You won't believe it, but almost any young girl who was beautiful and willing would have served your purpose. During the terrible years you've clothed her with your own idealism. You've told yourself that it was for her that you were fighting. You've created in your heart a person she never was and hasn't it in her to become. You've thought of her as a second you, with your sense of honor, your passion for unselfishness, your patience and experience gained through suffering. The ideal you've set up for her is contradictory and impossible. Youth isn't considerate, experienced, unselfish, patient. For those qualities you have to go to the middle years. I know what I'm talking about, for I've had three soldier husbands." She said it without self-reproach or self-glory—as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any woman. "You've been finding out the kind of girl she really is since your return—the kind of girl who prefers General Braithwaite to yourself and can't discriminate between the temporary and the permanent. You're disappointed in her. You've discovered already that she isn't the woman you thought you were loving. You're now only pretending that you still care for her because life would be too empty without your dream and because the right woman, for whom you've already renewed your search, hasn't yet turned up. Somewhere inside you at this moment your sane self is endorsing every word that I'm saying as true."
"That's not so." His contradiction was spoken fiercely.
"But it is so," the sweet voice persisted. "You yourself have tacitly owned it."
"How?"
There was the sharpness of alarm in his way of asking. Her assurance had startled him out of his brief anger.