"You mean that something must happen—that there will be a break between us?" she said.
Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered her.
"I can't go on this way. I'm not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose, we should have done it—but we've lost grip, we've lost endurance." Then he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is hell. I've been in hell for a year—don't you see it?"
After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so utterly free from passion, was its quality.
"As long as that—for a year?" she asked.
"Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I've fought—God knows I've fought—but I can't stand it. I've got to do something. I've got to find a way. You must have seen it coming, Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am."
"Do—do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes had he stabbed her.
"So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been coming on for two years—all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've been fighting it."
She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was like a woman of marble.
"You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me from the beginning," he said.