He answered nothing and the silence between them was for a little as if she had suddenly given him a chance. This effect moreover grew from what he finally said; which was after he had restlessly moved to the window, looked out thence for some instants and then come back. "You would definitely accept me if I did formally give up everything but this?"—and he jerked his head at the outer world of which he had with such intensity just renewed his impression.
"Ah," she disappointingly answered, "I don't absolutely say that."
Poor Pendrel again stared. "Then what do you say at all? Do you expect me to renounce for nothing?"
"I don't expect you, as I've perfectly told you, in any degree to renounce. Why should you?" she added. "No one will ever have an idea of what you have lost."
"No one but myself," he said with his eyes on her.
"Oh I think you will least of all."
She had answered so straight that it had almost the sound of levity; by the hint of which he was justly enough irritated. "It's too portentous—what you ask!"
But she found for this her quickest reply. "I don't ask anything. It's you who ask. I only answer. I decline the honour of your hand, and I give my reasons. If I had given none I should have been doubtless less absurd, and my reward is that I'm not really sure I should have been even less cruel. I'm sure," she continued, "but of one thing—or rather perhaps of two: that I'm as insane as you please, but that I'm also as rigid. Don't think, at all events, that you need, or that you possibly can, tell me how my attitude strikes you. Do me the simple justice to believe that I know."
So she appeared quietly to conclude, and it was in her quietness indeed that her perversity most showed; though this was in a manner an aid, if a lame one, to her suitor, called upon at a moment's notice both to measure its extent and to give up the hope of getting round it. "You call me a 'case,' but it seems to me you're at least as extraordinary a one."
"I didn't apply the term to you abusively," she made sufficient haste to explain. And then as, however she applied it, he but sat, in his hard dilemma, with his head in his hands: "Am I not the first to admit that I can only appear unaccountably exalted—it's the word you must have in your mind about me; and exalted on the subject on which it most seems to people grotesque to be so?" She gave herself up, in fine, as extravagant, maniacal, and then, further, to the moral of it, which was that they lacked all ground for possibly meeting. They must accept their preposterous difference, and she could herself do so the better that she was sure of what he had intended to say to her. He had his plans made; he "sailed," didn't he? next week, next month, next year even, if that should be more convenient to her, and had come to propose that she should sail with him. This was, as he saw, not so much as discussable; but he must go on sailing as if nothing whatever had happened. He must stay a long time, and it was indeed all but a certainty for her that when once he should get well into it he would find himself staying indefinitely. Yes, that was inevitably what must happen to him: he offered the bright example of a man of thirty, with means, curiosity, the highest culture, who had, for whatever reasons, never gone at all, but he would show how people with that history infallibly made it up by never coming back when once they did go. Why should he come back? With his tastes, his resources and opportunities, his intensified longing and disciplined youth, he would have an admirable life.