“What is there for us if we keep on and go away?” she went on. “All the big interests in our lives will vanish—everything. We shall become specialised people—people overshadowed by a situation. We shall be an elopement, a romance—all our breadth and meaning gone! People will always think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear? Just to specialise.... I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defending it and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care for Margaret—you care more than you think you do. You have said fine things of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have dropped from you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you. You feel that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you in relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another thing worth saving.”
Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into my face. “We've done wrong—and parting's paying. It's time to pay. We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track.... You and I, Master, we've got to be men.”
“Yes,” I said; “we've got to be men.”
4
I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid and clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.
I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to come home. It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room; only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.
I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the doorway. “May I come in?” she said.
“Do,” I said, and turned round to her.
“Working?” she said.
“Hard,” I answered. “Where have YOU been?”