“You have everything—everything,—good looks and distinction, brains and modernity, magnetism of a queer cold sort, knowledge of women and kindness of heart—I cannot understand. But the spark, the response, the exaltation is not there,—the splendid rush of emotion. I love you, but not in the way that makes matrimony marriage.”
He looked at her with his peculiar smile, an expansion of one corner of his mouth which gave him something of the expression of a satyr. “You were badly in need of a companion, and you found one in me. You wanted to be understood, and I understood you. You wanted sympathy, and I sympathised with you; but I am not the man, and I have never for one moment deluded myself.”
“Then why would you have allowed me to drift into matrimony with you?—as I should have done if I had not come here.”
“Because the experiment would have been no more dangerous than most matrimonial experiments. And it would have been very delightful for a time.”
“I should have loved you a good deal,” she said musingly, “and habit is a tremendous force. And I should never have permitted myself to recognise a mistake again—if the decisive step had been taken. Tell me—” she added abruptly, “do you believe that if I had married you that you would always have loved me?”
“I certainly should never have been so unwise as to promise to, for that is something no man can foretell. The chances are that I should not. All phases of feeling are temporary,—all emotions, all desires, all fulfilment. Life itself is temporary.”
“Should you have been true to me?”
“O-h-h, how in thunder can a man answer a question like that? That is something he never knows till the time comes. If he is sensible he wastes no time making resolutions, and if he is honest he makes no promises.”
“You do not love me,” she exclaimed triumphantly.
“I am merely more honest, perhaps more analytical than most men,—that is all. The man who swears he will love forever the woman that pleases him most is simply talking from the depths of ignorance straight up through his hat. No man knows anything—what he will do or feel to-morrow. He knows nothing of himself until his time comes to die, and then he knows blamed little.”