"Oh ... I don't know. What am I to say? What am I to do?"
"... Do nothing," he said bitterly.
"But I want to do something," Pam protested desperately—though her own shrinking conscience told her how little. "... And I don't say I won't try. But perhaps ... I could never learn. I don't know. How am I to know? And if I say I 'll try ... and can't in the end ... what a dreadful thing for us both.... Oh, are you quite sure there 's nothing short of love that will do?" she asked, with the lameness that can get no further, and wrenched her hands, and looked at him in helpless appeal.
"That means you won't try?" he said; and she could see his hand close tight upon the dresser.
"Oh, no, no, no ... I will try!" Pam cried, charging blindly down the open roadway of consent, for fault of any other way to turn. "... If you wish it, I 'll try. But oh, please, it is n't the least bit of a promise ... and you must n't ... must n't build on it. And you must n't try and force me to learn ... or be angry with me if I 'm slow ... or can't. Perhaps I can't. Oh, it may very well be that I can't ... for all my trying.
"... And even ... if I ever grew to care anything for you ... in the way you want—and I dare n't think or say. It all seems so sudden and unreal. It seems as though I were dreaming it. Last night—half an hour ago even—I never thought you wanted to speak to me or have anything to do with me at all, and now—you 're asking me to try and love you. And even if I grow to care for you in that way (and I don't know. Oh, you must n't think I 'm promising) I should n't want ... I mean it would have to be ... oh, for a long time. Years, perhaps. Longer than ever you cared to wait. I told ... somebody once, when they asked me—what you 've been asking me, that I never meant to get married. And if I did ... it would be like acting a story to them—as they said I was doing at the time. And I 've said 'No' to such lots of others too ... and now to say 'Yes' to anybody (and I 'm only saying half 'Yes'—only a quarter 'Yes'—to you) seems, somehow, like breaking faith. It seems mean ... and unfair. And anyway it could n't ... could n't possibly be yet. Could n't be for ever such a long time. Perhaps you 'd never want to wait so long as that."
"Wait?" He thrust out his hand desperately to shut this dangerous back-door of her concession. "With you at the end of my waiting ... I would wait till the Judgment Day."
The dreary, dogged patience of the man's passion chilled Pam. It rose up high in her mind like an awesome black monument of Patience, and cast its great shadow over the brightness of her life—on and on and on interminably, out of sight to the dull sun-setting of her clays. If she could have recalled her words then. If she could have had the strength, the moral strength, to throw him aside from her then and there—at never mind what momentary cost to their feelings. All her soul, she knew, was striving impotently to cast off the encumbrance of him—but the strength was lacking. Strength to be cruel; strength to be kind. Because she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required with her own hand ... she was throwing herself contemptibly upon the protection of the Future; making herself the Future's ward, and trusting, in some blind, unreasoning fashion, that her guardian would be responsible for her when the time came, and do for her what she had lacked the daring to do for herself, and free her without consequence (if so needed), and deal happiness all round with that lavish hand for which the Future is, and has been, and ever will be, so extolled.
Wild, fatal fantasy of Pam's—that she shared in common with every man, woman, and temporising child of this self-deluded, procrastinating world. For the Future is that dread witch that, appearing first under the guise of a sweet and amiable old lady, turns suddenly into the red-eyed, horrid old hag of to-day.
But alas! The compact was drawn and signed and sealed. What consequence that Pam imposed a hundred feverish reservations and supplications, and qualifications and amendments, and loopholes and contingencies upon her little old lady in the signing—and seemed to be granted them every one? Into this little old lady's house she signed herself for all that, and henceforth all her goings and comings, and sleepings and wakings were no longer her sweet own, as heretofore, but under the authority and subject to the control of the little sweet amiable old lady—who was only biding her good time (as you may be sure) to snap into the horrid, red-eyed hag we wot of, and fall upon Pam with the black venom of her malignant nature.