"It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes to that—where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just the superficial aspects of the case."
"Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence, "and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. We are different, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."...
"Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point. "Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending we shan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. We shall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and you can't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing and half-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing them and replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, try as I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive me again. You know——It's just as though we were each of us not one person, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together, and then disperse and forget and plot against each other...."
"Oh, things will happen again," said Trafford, in her pause. "But they will happen again with a difference—after this. With a difference. That's the good of it all.... We've found something here—that makes everything different.... We've found each other, too, dear wife."
She thought intently.
"I am afraid," she whispered.
"But what is there to be afraid of?"
"Myself."
She spoke after a little pause that seemed to hesitate. "At times I wish—oh, passionately!—that I could pray."
"Why don't you?"