There was a pause, till Katharine roused herself to speak in a lifeless kind of voice that did not seem to belong to her.
"I am sorry if it has made you unhappy," she said. Paul looked at her critically.
"Are you sure?" he asked, smiling.
Katharine folded and unfolded her hands uneasily, and wished he would go away and remove his disquieting presence from her life for ever.
"Oh, yes," she said. "One is always sorry when people are unhappy, of course."
"Only that?" His voice had a touch of disappointment in it, and she began to tremble for her composure. He got up and walked to the window and looked across the lawn, where the wintry sun was struggling through the bare branches of the elm trees and making faint intricate patterns on the whitened grass below. "This is where I first met you, three years ago," he went on as though he were talking to himself. "You were only a child then, and you interested me. I used to wonder what there was about you that interested me so much, a mere child like you! You were very sweet to me in those days, Katharine."
"I—I wish you wouldn't," said Katharine. But he did not seem to hear her.
"Most men would have behaved differently, I suppose," he went on, still looking away from her. "It is very fatal to admit the possibility, even to ourselves, of making a new system for an effete civilisation like ours; and I was a fool to suppose that women could be dealt with by any but the obvious methods. It is my own fault, of course, that in my anxiety to keep your respect I managed to destroy your affection."
She wanted to vindicate herself, to protest against what seemed to her his confident self-righteousness; but the old influence was creeping over her again, and it numbed her.
"I wish you would not say those things," she said, weakly. The unopened letter lying on the red table-cloth seemed like a protest against the futility of the scene that was passing, and she found herself controlling a desire to laugh at the mockery of it all.