“You know, ever since we came here,” he went on, his long fingers running through and through the steel fringes in her lap, “I’ve had the oddest sensation of losing myself—of seeing myself escape. Oh, it’s been wretched!” He shook his head.
She paled a little. The meaning under his words—a meaning of which he was unconscious—pierced her.
“Did you, really?” he asked her.
“Did I?” Her voice trembled.
“Try to get away from me?”
Oh, to have been sure she had been the reason of his wretchedness!
“Are you accusing me of taking back a gift, Tony?”
The look he gave her swallowed her fears, and the flippancies they engendered.
“Florence,” he said, “you’ve been always giving to me. You never think of getting. You won’t even take what belongs to you—myself, the opera, and whatever I may do or be.”
“But, Tony, years ago you gave me all that.”