"That's about it.... You've got nothing to complain of. You'll be better off with Chalfont."
She ran to him and held him.
"You can't believe there's anything like that," she cried piteously. "Why, he wouldn't look at me—not in that way. He knows I belong to you. If he thinks of me at all it's as he would of the little East-end children that people take down into the country for a day. He's a lord and I'm just common Maggy, and he condescended to be kind to me. Believe me, Fred, believe me, or I—I shall die. I can't live without you. You know I can't!"
Woolf did believe her. Although he hated Chalfont and his exclusiveness, which had once been the means of humbling him, he knew well enough that because of that very exclusiveness he would be punctilious in his attitude toward Maggy. He did not make the mistake of comparing Maggy's position with that of Mrs. Lambert. The latter was a woman of some social standing, separated from her husband. What did genuinely enrage Woolf was that Chalfont should be so contemptuous of his, Woolf's, relations with Maggy that he could be friendly with her in spite of them. It meant that he was ignored. It was inconceivable to him that Chalfont's attitude toward her was largely dictated by a touching respect for her personality, and pity that she should be associated with such a man as himself.
"Don't make a scene," was his unmoved rejoinder. "We can settle things quite quietly if you'll be sensible."
Maggy felt a fierce desire to scream and laugh and cry and so break her nightmare by noise. The cataclysm had come upon her so suddenly; the break seemed so imminent; her hold over Woolf so frail. She seemed to have held him by a thread and that thread had now snapped. Her sensation was one of absolute shipwreck. She experienced the very paralysis of actual drowning, the throbbing of pulses in her head, the suffocation in her throat, the sense of being entirely submerged. And just as the drowning person is said to survey the past with startling clearness so she now had a rapid mental vista of her brief season of love and the desolation that would follow it if Woolf meant what he said.
"I'm not sensible," she pleaded. "You can't give me up for such a little thing as that. Oh, you're cruel, cruel!"
"If you're going to be hysterical I shan't stop."
His unrelenting manner had a steadying effect on her. Tortured, but silent, she stared at him. Could this be the man whom she had been able to soften and cajole with a mere pose of her body; the man who had taken possession of her with such controlling ardor that she was oblivious of the very details of her capitulation; the man whom she had loved with such devastating vehemence? She could see by the utterly unmoved expression of his face that it was impossible to stir his pity. There might be a bare chance of exciting his passion, but a new-born delicacy of feeling in her prevented an appeal to that side of his nature. She made a strong effort to keep a hold on herself.
"I won't be hysterical," she said. "But—I can't understand why you're going on like this. You loved me before you went abroad. What has happened since?"