“Emily,” he began with forced calmness, “the time has come when we must have a plain talk. It can’t be put off any longer.”
She was sitting with her arms and her loosely-clasped, still gloved hands upon the table, staring across it into the fire. “I must not anger him,” she was saying to herself. “The time has passed when a plain talk would do any good.” Aloud she said: “I’m tired, George—and not in a good humour. Can’t you——”
Her impatience to be rid of him made him desperate. “I must speak, Emily, I must,” he replied. “For many months—in fact for nearly a year of our year and four months—I’ve seen that our plan was a failure. We’re neither bound nor free, neither married nor single. We—I, at least—am exposed to—all sorts of temptations. I need you—your sympathy, your companionship—all the time. I see you only often enough to tantalise me, to keep me in a turmoil that makes happiness impossible. And,” he looked at her uneasily, appealingly, “each time I see you, I find or seem to find that you have drifted further away from me.”
She did not break the silence—she did not know what to say. To be frank was to anger him. To evade was impossible.
“Emily,” he went on, “you know that I love you. I wish you to be happy and I know that you don’t wish me to be miserable. I ask you to give up, or at least put aside for the time, these ideas of yours. Let us announce our marriage and try to work out our lives in the way that the experience of the world has found best. Let us be happy again—as we were in the beginning.”
His voice vibrated with emotion. She sighed and there were tears in her eyes and her voice was trembling as she answered: “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do, George, to bring back the happiness we had. But—” she shook her head mournfully, “it is gone, dear.” A tear escaped and rolled down her cheek. “It’s gone.”
He was deceived by her manner and by his hopes and longings into believing that he was not appealing in vain; and there came back to him some of the self-confidence that had so often won for him with women. “Not if we both wish it, and will it, and try for it, Emily.”
“It’s gone,” she repeated, “gone. We can’t call it back.”
“Why do you say that, dear?”
“Don’t ask me. I can’t be untruthful with you, and telling the truth would only rouse the worst in us both. You know, George, that I wouldn’t be hopeless about it, if there were any hope. We’ve drifted apart. We can go on as we are now—friends. Or we can—can—drift still further—apart. But we can’t come together again.”