"There isn't," she said, "when—when you're in love with me."
He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively. She nodded.
"Because you aren't in love with me all the time. And when you aren't, you must see what I've done to you. You must—hate me for what I've done to you. I remember the first day we ever talked—when you laughed at my note-books. You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart and followed a bundle of hay. That's what I've made you do."
His face flushed deep. He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette into the fire. "That's perfectly outrageous nonsense," he said. "I won't listen to it."
"If it weren't true," she persisted, "you wouldn't be excited like that. If I hadn't known it before, I'd have known it when I saw you with the Lakes. You can give them something you can't give me, not with all the love in the world. I never heard about them till to-night—not in a way I'd remember. And there are other people—you spoke of some of them at dinner—who are living here, that you've never mentioned to me before. You've tried to sweep them all out of your life; to go to dances and the opera and things with me. You did it because you loved me, but it wasn't fair to either of us, Roddy. Because you can't love me all the time. I don't believe a man—a real man—can love a woman all the time. And if she makes him hate her when he doesn't love her, he'll get so he hates loving her."
"You're talking nonsense!" he said again roughly. He was pacing the room by now. "Stark staring nonsense!"
Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed so uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his stolen hours of solitude—thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to stamp out of existence.
"I'd like to know where you get that stuff. Is it from James Randolph? He's dangerous, that fellow. Oh, he's interesting, and I like him, but he's a cynic. He doesn't want anybody to be happier than he is. But what may be true of him, isn't true of me. I've never stopped loving you since the first day we talked together. And I should think I'd done enough to prove it."
"That's it," she said. "You've done too much. And you're so sorry for me when you don't love me, that it makes you do all the more."
She had found another joint in his armor. She was absolutely clairvoyant to-night, and this time he fairly cried out, "Stop it!"