“None.”
“And you are satisfied?”
“Absolutely,” he replied with an unnecessary emphasis. He was, he told himself aggressively; he wanted nothing more from living and had nothing to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted obscurely, bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations and desires, to which he had declared himself dead.
“I wonder if you are to be envied?” she queried.
A sudden astounding willingness to speak of himself, even of the past, swept over him.
“Hardly,” he replied. “All the things that men value were killed for me in an instant, in the flutter of a white skirt.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“There’s almost nothing to tell; it was so unrelated, so senseless and blind. It can’t be dressed into a story, it has no moral—no meaning. Well—it was twelve years ago. I had just been married, and we had gone to a property in the country. After two days I had to go into town, and when I came back Ellen met me in a breaking cart. It was a flag station, buried in maples, with a white road winding back to where we were staying.
“Ellen had trouble in holding the horse when the train left, and the beast shied going from the station. It was Monday, clothes hung from a line in a side yard and a skirt fluttered in a little breeze. The horse reared, the strapped back of the seat broke, and Ellen was thrown—on her head. It killed her.”
He fell silent. Millie breathed sharply, and a ripple struck with a faint slap on the yacht’s side. Then: “One can’t allow that,” he continued in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself; “arbitrary, wanton; impossible to accept such conditions—