"Cried?" said Dodo softly, sympathetically.
"No, I didn't cry. I smoked a cigarette and looked round in a stupid manner. Then I took out of its frame a big photograph of myself that I had given you, in order to tear it up. But I put it back in its frame again, and put the frame exactly where it was before."
Dodo gave a little moan.
"Oh, Jack, how you must have hated me!" she said.
"I hated what you had done: I hated that you could do it. But the other, never. And, Dodo, let us never talk about all those things again, don't let us even think of them. It is finished, and what is real is just beginning."
"It was real all along," she said, "and I knew it was real all along—you and me, that is to say—but I chose to tell myself that it wasn't. I have been like the people who when they hear the scream of somebody being murdered say it is only the cat. I have been a little brute all my life, and in all probability it is past half-time for me already; in fact it certainly is unless I am going to live to be ninety. I'm not sure that I want to, and yet I don't want to die one bit."
"I should be very much annoyed if you ventured to do anything of the sort," remarked Jack.
"Yes, and that is so wonderful of you. You ought to have wished me dead a hundred times. What's the phrase? 'Yes, she would be better dead.' Just now I want to be better without being dead. I often think we all have a sort of half-time in our lives, like people in foot-ball matches, when they stop playing and eat lemons. The lemons, you understand, are rather sour reflections that we are no better than we might be, but a great deal worse. And somehow that gives one a sort of a fresh start, and we begin playing again."
They arrived at Winston late in the afternoon; the village had turned out to greet them, flags and arches made rainbow of the gray street with its thatched houses and air of protected stability, and from the church-tower the bells pealed welcome. Dodo, always impressionable and impulsive, was tremendously moved, and with eyes brimming over, leaned out of one side of the carriage and then the other to acknowledge these salutations.