“Why?”
“You don’t understand, because you don’t know what duty means. I have been guilty before her for a long time.”
“That is the morality which smothers life with mould and dulness. Vera, Vera, you don’t love, you do not know how!”
“You ought not to speak like that, unless you wish to drive me to despair. Am I to think that there is deception in your past, that you want to ruin me when you do not love me?”
“No, no, Vera,” he said, rising hastily to his feet. “If I had wanted to deceive you I could have done so long ago.”
“What a desperate war you wage against yourself, Mark, and how you ruin your own life!” she cried, wringing her hands.
“Let us cease to quarrel, Vera. Your Grandmother speaks through you, but with another voice. That was all very well once, but now we are in the flood of another life where neither authority nor preconceived ideas will help us, where truth alone asserts her power.”
“Where is truth?”
“In happiness, in the joy of love. And I love you. Why do you torture me. Why do you fight against me and against yourself, and make two victims?”
“It is a strange reproach. Look at me. It is only a few days since we saw one another, and have I not changed?”