“Why, Madeline,” he said again, “I beg your pardon. I'm sorry—”
“Oh, it isn't that,” she sobbed. “It isn't that. I don't care what you said.”
“What is it, then?”
She raised her head and looked at him.
“It is you,” she cried. “It is myself. It is everything. It is all wrong. I—I was so happy and—and now I am miserable. Oh—oh, I wish I were dead!”
She threw herself upon the cushions again and wept hysterically. He stood above her, stroking her hair, trying to soothe her, to comfort her, and all the time he felt like a brute, a heartless beast. At last she ceased crying, sat up and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
“There!” she exclaimed. “I will not be silly any longer. I won't be! I WON'T! . . . Now tell me: Why have you changed so?”
He looked down at her and shook his head. He was conscience-stricken and fully as miserable as she professed to be.
“I don't know,” he said. “I am older and—and—and I DON'T see things as I used to. If that book of mine had appeared three years ago I have no doubt I should have believed it to be the greatest thing ever printed. Now, when people tell me it is and I read what the reviewers said and all that, I—I DON'T believe, I KNOW it isn't great—that is, the most of it isn't. There is some pretty good stuff, of course, but—You see, I think it wasn't the poems themselves that made it sell; I think it was all the fool tommyrot the papers printed about me, about my being a hero and all that rubbish, when they thought I was dead, you know. That—”
She interrupted. “Oh, don't!” she cried. “Don't! I don't care about the old book. I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about you. YOU aren't the same—the same toward me.”