It was not at all an unanswerable question; nor one, indeed, that he shrank from. But it wanted a little preliminary reflection. She interrupted before he was ready to speak.
"Of course, I really know. Have known all along. You haven't forgiven me."
He echoed that word with a note of helplessness.
"No," she conceded. "That isn't it, exactly. I can't talk the way you and Mary can. I suppose you have forgiven me, as far as that goes. That's the worst of it. If you hadn't there'd be more to hope for. Or beg for. I'd do that if it were any good. But this is something you can't help. You're kind and sweet to me, but you've just stopped caring. For me. What used to be there has just—gone snap. It's not your fault. I did it myself."
"No," he said quickly. "That's where you're altogether wrong. You didn't do it. You had nothing to do with the doing of it."
She winced, visibly, at the implication that, whoever was responsible, the thing was done.
"Paula, dearest!" he cried, in acute concern. "Wait! There are things that can't be dealt with in a breath. That's why I was trying to think a little before I answered."
Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go on. It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while she waited! He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.
"You are dearer to me now—at this moment, as we sit here—than ever you've been before. I think that's the simple literal truth. This matter of forgiveness—of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy my—love for you… Oh, it's too wildly off the facts to be dealt with rationally! I owe you my life. That's not a sentimental exaggeration. Even Steinmetz says so. And you saved it for me at the end of a period of weeks—months I guess—when I had been devoting most of my spare energies to torturing you. Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious about that. In an attempt to assert a—proprietary right in you that you had never even pretended to give me. That I'd once promised you I never would assert. The weight of obligation I'm under to you would be absolutely crushing—if it weren't for one thing that relieves me of it altogether. The knowledge that you love me. That you did it all for the love of me."
She moved no nearer him. These were words. There was no reassurance for her in them. One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old passion, would have brought her, rapturous, to his knees.