"How can you bear to touch me?" Julia said. She demanded nothing. Helpless and waiting, she was clinging to him. Her legs were warm and weak and tired. She was glad of the chair, and only in terror that Laurence might go. "Don't leave me, Laurence! Please don't leave me!"
"I won't leave you, Julia." For a moment he pitied her, but suddenly he knew how much outside her he was. She was taking no account of him at all. He needed to resist her as if she were some awful weight. He was so tired. She was crushing him. He wanted to live. He wanted to be away from her. "I want to go—not far—out somewhere. I want to be alone for a while. I have to think things out."
"I know, Laurence! You can't bear me! I've killed what you had for me!"
He was annoyed by her unthinking phrases, and that she showed no knowledge of the new emotion which pain had created in him. It was hard to leave her in distress, but he felt that he must go to save himself.
He left the room quietly, and went downstairs and into his study. The house was still, perhaps empty, but he closed the door after him and locked it. He was afraid of his own room with its unfamiliar walls.
He sat down awkwardly in the darkness, aware of his own movements as of the gestures of some one else. He conceived a peculiar disgust for the short heavy man who was humped soddenly in the arm-chair. He disliked the man's clothes, expensive ill-fitting clothes draping a massive body. Most of all he hated the man's small delicate hands, ridiculous below his big sleeves.
Laurence, out of his own fatigue, had abandoned the moral idea, and he pleased himself now with the bitter lenience of his judgment. He had known for a long time that Julia was dissatisfied and had even sensed the pathos in her passing enthusiasms with their glamour of profundity. He had seen her young and lovely, futile except to him, and, when he had pitied her passion for the sublime, it had only added a paternal quality to his feeling for her, so that he loved her more inwardly and quietly. His unshaken pessimism regarding life had made him more and more gentle of her when he saw that she yet clung to the things which, for him, had failed. He perceived now that his very disbelief had been the symbol of a too complete faith which she had made grotesque. If he had been able to condemn her, the moral justification would have afforded him an emotional outlet. He was helpless with a hurt that was his alone.
Who was he, he said ironically to himself, that he should refuse the lie with which humanity sustains itself.
Dudley wrote Julia that he was grieved that she excluded him from her confidence. He was suffering deeply and he wanted to be a friend to both her and Laurence. He had not anticipated anything like her silence.