He shook his head.
“Can’t help it,” he said. “I’m going to be a mule: I—I must look like one.”
“Will you think it over then, first,” she asked, “before you do anything?”
“I have thought it over. Will you think it over? I know you agree with me really, but I can’t get at the part of you that agrees. It’s there, though.”
She knew that just as well as he did, but made no promise, and with a face troubled and yet determined he left her.
It was that which started the wave of loneliness far out on the sea, and she sat there idly, after he had gone, not yet aware of its approach, but only of the deadly, bored depression that had settled down on her, never lifting, since the day that she had driven down to Grote alone and late on a Saturday night in July. She no longer wanted to see him who should have been her companion then, though for a day or two after that, she would have forgiven even that monstrous letter of his revelation of himself, could her forgiveness have brought him back. And yet Robin had said that respect had something to do with love....
When he had said it she, or some part of her, had acquiesced, and yet when she read Kuhlmann’s letter, though there was no one in the world for whom she had so profound a contempt, she still longed for his presence. Was that, then, another sort of love, something possibly not less real, certainly not less insistent, but more animal, essentially lower? She had always hated seeing Robin and Kuhlmann together, and had rather laughed at herself for her sentimentality, her squeamishness. And then, by degrees almost imperceptible, any other feeling for the man who had so grossly insulted her, but mere contempt, had been distilled away, leaving just that sediment which unemotionally despised him.
But that draining away of the boiling, bubbling liquid which had filled her heart, had left it totally apathetic to all the myriad interests and diversions of her life. Even the tremendous impact of the breaking-out of war had failed to rouse her from it, her whole soul seemed drugged into a drowsy, depressed somnolence. She cared for nothing, and she disliked nothing, except only that which concerned Robin. The live tissues of the mind that record the emotions were not dead: she still wanted to want, wanted to enjoy, wanted to feel, but they lay as if under some opiate that deprived them of sensation.
The only thing that for these last days had in the least interested her was the obtaining for Robin the post that would keep him in town, doing work which undeniably must be done, dressed in khaki as every self-respecting young man was, with little red tabs on his shoulders and a red band on his cap to show that he was not merely a puff of steam from the engine, but part of the intelligence that directed it. All that was alive in her clung to the sound sense of the simile, which Robin himself had admitted.... But somewhere in the drowsed, drugged part of her mind some instinct within her despised that sound sense as completely as Robin himself despised it. He, too, had drawn the distinction between “thinking” and “feeling,” wondering if she understood. Good heavens, did she not understand? Was not three quarters of life a battle between thinking and feeling?
She was not one of those optimistic lunatics who talked about the exposure of the enemy’s lengthening lines of communication, when day by day the tide of the black advance swept across the map towards Paris and the Channel ports, nor did she number herself with the large mass of folk who cheerfully maintained that the great steam-roller from the East was now giving forth encouraging hoots, as a signal for its starting on its relentless journey to Berlin. But at present, though not cheerful, she cared about the war as little as they, because she could not care about anything. It had broken out at a time when she was still stunned by the greatest emotional blow, delivered with every circumstance of insult and contempt, that she had ever experienced. It had taken away all her power of keen feeling, except as regards Robin. All but that slim passage between her emotions and life was choked with dead leaves.