Mattern exhaled smoke. "All right, you had a grudge against me, but what did you have against her? If you were using her to get back at me, then I think you have no cause to reproach me for anything I did. Maybe your foster-mother was right; there is bad blood in the family."
The young spaceman was still silent.
Lyddy lifted her head. There was resolution on her tear-smudged face. "I'm going to leave you, Len! I can't go on living with a man who does the awful, evil, unnatural things you do...." Her voice petered out as her vocabulary proved unequal to her emotions. Poor Lyddy, he thought. And then, Poor Len, with emotions unequal to his vocabulary.
"Everything I did, I did for your sake, Lyddy," he told her softly, but no longer with any hope of her comprehension. "It was because I was poor and couldn't afford your love that I went into hyperspace." He couldn't help adding, "Doesn't it mean anything to you that I risked a whole universe for your sake, and that now I have worlds to offer you?"
"Don't put the blame on me, Len Mattern!" Angry tears stood in her eyes. "I never wanted anybody to do that much for me. All I wanted were nice things and somebody to take care of me and maybe love me. I never wanted to have the whole universe risked for me." Her voice broke on the truth. "Nobody's worth all that!"
She was right, he thought—being given too much can be worse than being given too little. The words spilled out of her; he'd been so disenchanted by her stupidity that he gave her credit for less understanding than she did have.
"You wouldn't've been able to wait fifteen-sixteen years for me if you really loved me. But you were happy the way you were—you and that extraterrestrial of yours. All you wanted was to dream about me. You were a fool ever to have come back for me; you shoulda stuck with your dreams."