“That I’d be miserable if I married a man I didn’t love.”
“Don’t you love him?”
She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing-table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self-sufficient—the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations—offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. “It’s rather hard on Owen, isn’t it, that you should have waited until now to tell him?”
She reflected a moment before answering. “I told him as soon as I knew.”
“Knew that you couldn’t marry him?”
“Knew that I could never live here with him.” She looked about the room, as though the very walls must speak for her.
For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.
“Yes——” she said, and stood up.
Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.
“There—that for instance,” Sophy Viner said.