"Thank you very much!" he observed with frank irritation. "I had rather you found me ugly enough to think of. If I could make out what it is you want one to have done I promise you it wouldn't leave me gaping. What is it, what is it?" he pressed. "There's something you've a fancy for that we're not in the way of—any of us: devilish poor lot as we are! I've at least this superiority, you see, that I want to know it. Name it—come, name it; and no matter how dreadful or how criminal it may be I won't flinch from it."
Still with her eyes on him, and even, as it might have seemed, with the oddest perversity of admiration, she waited after her wont. But when she spoke it was terrible. "Just pursue your studies."
It positively affected him for an instant as a blow across the face, putting a quick flush there and a tear in each eye. "How you must really hate me!" And then as she herself changed colour: "And all because I've written a book!"
Though she changed colour indeed she granted nothing: "Which I've read," she only replied, "with the greatest interest—even if I don't pretend to have understood it all. I hope you'll write many more."
"'Many more'!"—he laughed out. "Charming," he scoffed without seeing where he went, "charming the way you appear to imagine one throws such things off! The idea people have of 'books'——!" He had gone too far before he saw it—had gone so far that the next instant, at the sight of something in her face, there was nothing but to pull up. She really cared, and he had been calling her 'people,' had been grotesquely tilting before her at a shapeless object stuck up by himself, and stuck up crooked. She really cared, yes; yet what was it withal she cared for? He took a different tone in a moment to ask her, and in another she had begun in her own way to tell him.
"I've had in my mind—in connection with my ever marrying again—a condition; but it's a matter I meant to speak of only when driven to the wall, as I'm bound to say I think you've driven me." With which she went on as if it explained everything. "I've come home, you know, to stay."
For Ralph it explained too little; yet as there was something in her look that amplified it he saw more or less what was coming and he smiled without pleasure. "You said that—don't you remember?—the last time."
"Yes, I said it the last time, and you've every right to laugh at it and to doubt it. No one but myself can know that I'm serious, or why, and I can't give my reasons and I dare say I must accept being ridiculous. At any rate," she added with a kind of beautiful grimness, "I shan't parade my ridicule about the world. I shall have it out here." The force of her emphasis affected him indeed as strange, but she pursued before he had time to take it up. "I shall never—oh but never—go back."
It struck of a sudden a fuller light, and he seemed to understand. There was something she wouldn't, she couldn't name, but her accent alone sufficiently betrayed it. She had had "somewhere abroad," as poor Ralph used so often to put it, an encounter, an adventure, an agitation, that, filling her with rage or shame, leaving behind it a wound or a horror, had ended by prescribing to her, as a balm or vengeance, the abjuration of the general world that had made it possible. What such an accident could have been—to such a woman—was ground for wonder; but Ralph felt easily enough that it was yet none of his affair and that he should even perhaps at no price ever learn it. It had poisoned for her a continent, a hemisphere, and such a hush for the moment fell upon him that he might verily have been in presence of it. While they kept in communication during these instants he at any rate put things together. "The condition you speak of is then that one shall never ask you again to leave this country?"
She shook her head as for pity of his poor vision, though he pretended so to vision. "No. It's worse than that."