“Yes.… But—if he will not come back?”
“He will not come back,” said Melville, “for the work.”
“I know.”
“He will not come back for his self-respect—or any of those things.”
“No.”
“Those things, you know, are only fainter dreams. All the palace you have made for him is a dream. But——”
“Yes?”
“He might come back—” he said, and looked at her and stopped. He tells me he had some vague intention of startling her, rousing her, wounding her to some display of romantic force, some insurgence of passion, that might yet win Chatteris back, and then in that moment, and like a blow, it came to him how foolish such a fancy had been. There she stood impenetrably herself, limitedly intelligent, well-meaning, imitative, and powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested nothing but a clear and reasonable objection to all that had come to her, a critical antagonism, a steady opposition. And then, amazingly, she changed. She looked up, and suddenly held out both her hands, and there was something in her eyes that he had never seen before.
Melville took her hands mechanically, and for a second or so they stood looking with a sort of discovery into each other’s eyes.
“Tell him,” she said, with an astounding perfection of simplicity, “to come back to me. There can be no other thing than what I am. Tell him to come back to me!”