She loved his violence and gained courage from it.
“You mustn’t think it mean of me. I don’t care a bit what people say, but I don’t want to hurt you—in your work, I mean. It isn’t all that I think and mean, but it is a part of it, a little part of it. People are furious at our being seen together. It began at the picnic. We were seen walking over the Heath. Clowes told me. She can’t bear it. She’s a good friend. . . . It hurt me when she told me, and I knew that I must tell you. It isn’t only old women. It is all the important people, who can hurt your work.”
“Nobody can hurt my work.”
“But they can. They are saying your work is bad, all the people who said it was so good only last year, all the people who believed in you. And it’s all through me. It’s my fault.”
She began to weep silently. He was unmoved by the sight of it, so appalled was he by the sudden devastation of his life. Suffering within himself he knew, but hostility from without he had not had to face. . . . Many little slights were explained—men who had given him an indifferent nod, men who had apparently not seen him in the street. In the surprise of it he was blind even to her. It was like a sandstorm covering him up, filling with grit every little chink and crevice of his being. He snorted with fury and contempt.
He shook himself free of the oppression of it. This was nothing to do with her; it was not what he wanted from her—the gossip and tittle-tattle, the sweepings of the studios. The models sickened him of that. . . . So it was his turn now. Well, other men had survived it.
“That isn’t why you want to say good-bye.”
“No. I’m not pleading to you to let me off, or anything like that. I believe in you more than in anybody else, more than I do in myself. . . . I don’t believe in myself much.”
It had all seemed clear to her before she had come. He would understand how wrong and twisted the whole thing had become. They would suffer together and they would see how useless such suffering was in a world of beauty and charm and youth, and they would part because they had to part. He would understand, even if she could not rightly understand, for he was strong and simple and direct, and free of the soft vanity of youth.
But he did not understand. He was angry and domineering.