"Or for a time."
"Like the rest of them? Isn't that how they all began?" he asked.
She sighed and clasped her hands together. "Oh, Arthur, I'm afraid," she confessed. "I don't know what I'm afraid of. It isn't of him or of anything he can do to us. I've been arguing with myself, but it's no good. It just comes down to the one fact that I'm afraid."
Almost instinctively Arthur put out his hand and laid a finger on her pulse. "Since when have you been afraid?" he asked her.
"Ever since he came in yesterday," she told him. "He was just as usual, not overtired as far as I could see, or put out, or anything. But directly I began to talk to him this queer feeling of fear came over me. It was ... Arthur, it was just as if I knew something terrible was going to happen." She slipped her pulse from his fingers, thrust her hand into his, and clung to it tightly as she continued, "And I've been thinking that perhaps I may have been wrong about him. I don't believe I slept an hour last night. I kept going over it all again and again until I nearly persuaded myself that he had always meant well—underneath. And if he has, and I desert him now, and the shock of it made him ill—it might, mightn't it?—I should feel so awful about it. Oh! what do you think we ought to do? You know we might be—be married—here—and go on much as we have been—with that difference."
For a moment Arthur was tempted, realising in his own feelings something of what the other dwellers in the house must have gone through before they descended to their present level of fatalistic acceptance. And if he had not been so deeply in love with Eleanor he would almost certainly have yielded as the others had done before him. He was saved by the memory of his own abasement the previous morning. He had known then that he could never be worthy of her so long as he was too inert to face the struggle of life.
He put his arm round her and drew her close to him—the first caress he had dared. "No," he said. "Quite definitely no! I should hate myself if we did that. You have cured me of the least wish to slack my life away. I shouldn't be good enough for you, if I did. I don't mean to say that I'm good enough in any case, but I shall try to be...." He paused, and with the lingering fondness of one who murmurs the tenderest of all endearments, added softly, "Eleanor."
Her only answer was to press a little nearer to him, and he felt that she was now leaning upon his strength; she who had given him that strength in the first instance.
"It was you who made me see everything so clearly, yesterday," he went on. "I saw myself as I was, a detestable parasite. I could have hated myself for daring to love you. And whatever happens, I could not face that feeling again. It has gone absolutely. I don't believe I should ever have had it if it hadn't been for the influences and temptations of this place. It undermines one's will—though it has never undermined yours."
She hid her face. "It has, it has," she whispered. "I didn't know it until last night. I thought I was strong."