"I was very stupid," he said. "I thought that because I had come into a big thing I would be big myself. It is not so; I am the same person as I was in England. I have not changed at all and I shall never change ... only in this one thing that whether you go from me or whether you stay I shall never love anybody but you. All men say that, I know," he added, "but there are not many men who have had so little in their lives as I, and so perhaps it means more with me than it does with others."
She made no reply to him. She had not, I believe, heard him. She said, as though she were speaking to herself: "If we had not come, John, if we had stayed in Petrograd, anything might have been. But here there is something more than people. I don't know whether I love or hate any one. I cannot marry you or any man until this is all over."
"And then," he interrupted passionately, touching her sleeve with his hand. "After the war? Perhaps—again, you will—"
She took his hand in hers, looking at him as though she were suddenly seeing him for the first time:
"No—you, John, never. In Petrograd I didn't know what this could be—no idea—none. And now that I'm here I can think of nothing else than what I'm going to find. There is something here that I'd be afraid of if I let myself be and that's what I love. What will happen when I meet it? Shall I feel fear or no? And so, too, if there were a man whom I feared...."
She looked at him and did not answer. He caught her hand urgently. "No, Marie, no—any one but Semyonov. It doesn't matter about me. But you must be happy—you must be. Nothing else—and he won't make you. He isn't—"
"Happy!" she answered scornfully. "I don't want to be happy. That isn't it. But to be sure that one's not afraid—" (She repeated to herself several times Hrabrost—the Russian for "bravery.") "That is more than you, John, or than I or than—"
She broke off, looked at him suddenly as he told me "very tenderly and kindly as though she liked me."
"John, I'm your friend. I've been bad to you, but I'm your friend. I don't understand why I've been so bad to you because, I would be fur-rious—yes, fur-rious—if any one else were bad to you. And be mine, John, whatever I do, be mine. I'm not really a bad character—only I think it's too exciting now, here—everything—for me to stop and think."