"I have received my dismissal from you," he said, "as head of your house, as your possible husband. As I said, I won't take the place of the tame cat instead. God knows I don't want to cut adrift from you, and I can't cut adrift from you. But my aspiration is rendered impossible, and therefore both my mental attitude to you and my conduct must be altered. I daresay Berts and Tommy and Esther and all the rest of them will go lying about on your bed, and smoking in your bedroom just as before. Well, I can't be intimate in that sort of way any longer. You said you never reckoned whether you respected me or not, and that may be so. But without wanting to be heavy about it, I have got to respect myself. I can't help being your lover, but I can help tickling my love, so to speak, making it squirm and wriggle. Whether I am respectable or not, it is, and I shan't—as I said—I shan't tickle it. Also though I would be hurt in any other way for your sake, I won't be hurt like that. Don't misunderstand me. It is because my love for you is not one atom abated, that I won't play tricks with it. But when it says to me, 'I can't bear it,' I shall not ask to bear it. You always found me too easy to understand: I think this is another instance of it."
He paused a moment and Nadine gave a little sobbing sigh.
"Oh, Hughie," she began.
"No, don't interrupt," he said. "I want to go through with it, without discussion. There is no discussion possible. I wouldn't argue with God about it. I should say: 'You made me an ordinary human man, and you've got to take the consequences. In the same way, you have chosen Seymour, and I am telling you what is the effect. Now—you are tired of hearing it—I love you. And therefore I want your happiness without reservation. You have decided it will conduce to your happiness to marry Seymour. Therefore, Nadine—this is quite simple and true—I want you to do so. I may rage and storm on the surface, but essentially I don't. Somewhere behind all I may say and do, there is, as you once said to me, the essential me. Well, that says to you, 'God bless you.' That's all."
He unclasped his hands from round his knees, and stood up.
"I'm going away now," he said. "I thought when I came down it might take a long time to tell you this. But it has taken ten minutes only. I thought perhaps you would have a lot to say about it, and I daresay you have, but I find that it doesn't concern me. Don't think me brutal, any more than I think you brutal. I am made like this, and you are made otherwise. By all means, let us see each other, often I hope, but not just yet. I've got to adjust myself, you see, and you haven't. You never loved me, and so what you have done makes no difference in your feelings towards me. But I've got to get used to it."
She looked up at him, as he stood there in front of her with the green lights through the beech-leaves playing on him.
"You make me utterly miserable, Hugh," she said.
"No, I don't. There is no such thing as misery without love. You don't care for me in the way that you could—could give you the privilege of being miserable."
For one half-second she did not follow him. But immediately the quickness of her mind grasped what came so easily and simply to him.