"What do you mean?" he said, his eyes upon her.
"Help me by our not meeting, by our not writing, by our doing nothing—nothing——"
"No—No," he answered her, his eyes set upon her.
"You don't get me any other way. Francis, don't you see that we're not the sort of people, either of us, to put up with the deceits, the trickeries, the lies that the other thing means? Some people might—lots of people do, I suppose—but we're not built that way. We're idealists—We aren't made to stand quietly and see all the quality of the thing vanish before our eyes—just to take the husk when we've known what the kernel was like.
"Besides, it isn't as though I hated Roddy. If I did I'd go off with you now, in a minute if you wanted me, although even then it would be a hopeless thing for us to do. But I'm very fond of Roddy. I'm not in love with him—I never have been—I told him from the first—But I'm going to do my best by him."
"Why did you come here?"
"I came here because I was driven towards you. I wanted to hear you say that you loved me—I wanted to tell you that I loved you. We've both of us said it. We know it now—and we've got to keep it, the most precious thing in the world.
"But we should soon hate one another if we destroyed one another's ideals. For many people it wouldn't matter—For us, weak as we are, it matters everything."
"All this talk," he said. "I'm a man. I'm here to love you, not to talk about it. I've got you and I'm going to keep you."
"You haven't got me," she cried. "You've got a bit of me. There'll be times when I'm away from you when I shall think that you've got all of me. But you haven't—no one's got all of me....