In her own look, however, was doubt. “You see what?”
“Why what you mean—what you’ve always meant.”
She again shook her head. “What I mean isn’t what I’ve always meant. It’s different.”
“It’s something new?”
She hung back from it a little. “Something new. It’s not what you think. I see what you think.”
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. “It isn’t that I am a blockhead?” he asked between faintness and grimness. “It isn’t that it’s all a mistake?”
“A mistake?” she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. “Oh no,” she declared; “it’s nothing of that sort. You’ve been right.”
Yet he couldn’t help asking himself if she weren’t, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. “Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan’t have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I haven’t lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven’t waited but to see the door shut in my face?”
She shook her head again. “However the case stands that isn’t the truth. Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The door isn’t shut. The door’s open,” said May Bartram.
“Then something’s to come?”