“You are. But you’re not kind to me often.”
“Not often,” she murmured.
He stooped; in the darkness he could say it—the old, old question which, through repetition, had lost its generosity and splendor. “Am I never going to make you love me?”
She turned her face away, so that his kiss fell on her neck. “I don’t know, don’t know, Lorie? How should I? I don’t want to hurt you. You do believe me when I say that? But I’m fickle. I’m not at all what you think me. I’m all wrong somewhere inside—cold and bad-hearted.”
He laid his cheek against hers, holding her more tightly. “Little Eve. Please! You shan’t accuse yourself. It wounds.”
She broke away, but only that she might return of herself. She caught him by the lapels of his coat and tiptoed against him. “But I am. Harry’s quite right to hate me. I send you on long journeys, and you can’t forget me. I won’t love you myself, and I keep you from loving another woman. You offer me your soul, and I allow you to go thirsty. I torture you, and give you nothing.”
He spoke very gently, for the first time honest. “I can put it in fewer words: you want to be loved; you won’t pay the price of loving. Isn’t that it?”
She pressed her golden head against his shoulder in ashamed assent. Behind her shuttered eyes she had the vision of a long white road leading up to a city, of a curly-headed boy and an elfin-girl steering through the traffic beneath street lamps. She wanted to have the palm without the dust, to be a mother without the sacrifice of having children. Seeing the vision of children going from her, and knowing that he would understand, she whispered, “One day I shall be old—and I shall have missed all that.”
“Poor little Eve! Poor little girl!”
He picked her up in his arms and commenced to walk through the twilight, across fields, to the cottage.