'You see through people so much that you forget they are people at all.'
'That comes from living with you. I have to see through you to realise that you are a person....'
'Oh! I am a person then?'
'Only to me.... You reflect everybody else.'
'They are not worth more.'
'They are. Everybody is. If only you would be yourself to them, they would be themselves.'
'Oh!'
She had stung him, as she so often did, into self-realisation and self-criticism, a process so painful that, left to himself, he avoided it altogether.... He walked along moodily. They were crossing St James's Park. On the bridge he stopped, looked down into the water and said gloomily.
'I sometimes think that my soul is as placid and still and shallow as that water, and that you, like all the rest, have only seen your own reflection in me.... That's why I like the comfort of restlessness and change. Anything to break the stillness.'
'You couldn't say that if it were true,' she said.