Laurence saw the blood spread on the embroidery and make a stain. He was all at once insanely amused. What she was saying seemed an absurd revelation of their distance from each other. She never considered him as distinct from herself. He found it ludicrous.
His finger tips moved along the edge of the table. He picked up a dish and set it down. In his heart he knew that Dudley was her only lover, but he was jealous of his right to suspect that it was otherwise. It made him cruel toward her when he realized how seldom it occurred to her that he might disbelieve what she said. "That is your affair—between you and him, Julia. I'm not interested in it."
She watched him helplessly. "Laurence, why is it always like this?"
He saw her hands shaking. He wanted them to shake. All grew dim before his eyes. He turned quickly from her and walked out of the room. He could not hurt her. It was terrible not to be able to hurt her. He fancied that he hated her more because he was so unable to revenge himself for her manner of ignoring him.
He went on through the hall into the street. He knew that Julia was robbing him of the detachment in which he had taken refuge from earlier suffering. He no longer possessed himself. Not even his own pain belonged to him.
He's cast her off so she comes to me. He did not think so, but he wanted to indulge himself in this belief. He had hitherto controlled a loathing for Dudley which was unreasoning. Now he resented Dudley for Julia's sake and could despise her through this very resentment.
Julia's isolation was pathetic, yet Laurence had only to recall the physical nature of his emotion when they were together to know that he could not express his pity for her. He tried to force all intimate sense of her out of his mind. When he actually considered himself rid of her he was conscious of being bright and blank like a mirror from which the reflections are withdrawn, and there was a crazy stirring of laughter through the emptiness in him.
He passed along the neat sidewalks, his head bowed. His air of abstraction was ostentatious. He wanted to enjoy uninterruptedly the relaxation of self-loathing. There were deep, violet-red shadows on the newly-washed asphalt street. The treetops were still and glistening against the line of faintly gilded roofs. The grass blades on the ordered lawns were green glass along which the quiet light trickled. Well-dressed children played under the eyes of nurse maids. A limousine was drawn up in the shrubbery that surrounded a Georgian portico. Laurence decided that he was relieved by the failure which separated him from the pretensions of success.
He recalled the unhappiness of his first marriage, and the depression he had experienced with his baby's death. It pleased him that he seemed doomed to fail in every relationship.
Alice and I are strangely alike after all. He took a grandiose satisfaction in the delayed admittance that he and Alice were alike. Wondering if Julia would ultimately leave him, he told himself that he was the one who ought to go away to save Bobby from the contamination of such bitterness.