Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
“For me,” she said at last, “our political work has been a religion—it has been more than a religion.”
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the implications of that.
“And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do—talking of going over, almost lightly—to those others.”...
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. “It's because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it,” I said.
“I don't see how you can say that,” she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
“Oh!” she said and clenched her hand upon the table. “That it should have come to this!”
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything else the relief of weeping.
“I've told you,” I said awkwardly, “as soon as I could.”