“Oh! what can you mean? Surely we are saying too much. We shall reproach ourselves later. I live, again and again, through one conversation. The phrases come into my mind with every possible shade of significance.”
She pushed back her hat, and pressed her hand to her brow, which was contracting nervously as she spoke.
“I don't wish to be altered by any change in principle,” she continued, “nor distracted, from my plain obligations, into other interests. I daresay I sound quite heartless and odd. I daresay you won't like me any more.” Her voice faltered, but her lips remained precise. “But one must know one's mind—one must. You don't know yours; that is the whole trouble, David.”
She had never called him by his Christian name before, and now the forced sternness of her tone gave it almost the accent of a farewell.
“Perhaps we have helped each other,” she went on; “at all events, you have taught me how to look at things. You are clever and original and all that. I am rather commonplace, and I never have new or surprising thoughts. The more I learn, the more I grow attached to the ordinary ways. Once you called me the ideal bourgeoise. You were right.”
“Not entirely,” said Rennes. “You think too much.”
“You taught me that. I never used to consider people or notions. I accepted them without criticism.”
“The madness of criticism has entered into you,” he said. “It is the worst, most destructive thing on earth.”
“How could I have accepted you—as my friend—without it?” she asked. “You puzzled me. I tried to understand you. No one had ever puzzled me before. No one, you may be quite sure, will ever puzzle me, in the same degree, again.”
She gave him a long, tearful glance, in which defiance, reproach, determination, and a certain cruelty shone like iron under water. He made a movement toward her. The strength of his more emotional nature might have made a final assault—not uselessly—on her assumed “reasonableness.” No appeal, no threat could have moved her from the mental attitude she had decided on—the duty of keeping her word to Lord Reckage. But she might have been urged to the more candid course of ascertaining how far his lordship's true happiness was really involved in the question. At that moment, however, Mrs. Rennes came into the room. She gave a little cry of surprise when she saw her son. Then she kissed Agnes, and sat down, looking anxiously from one to the other with something not unlike grief, not unlike jealousy.