He looked at her with some impatience in his glance.
“Whether she was the woman she should have been or not is a thing that neither concerns nor interests me. She was the woman I loved. The whole thing is in that.”
“And the woman you still love? Is that true, Harold?”
“True as death,” he said; “but what does it all matter? Your relentlessness is the friend’s natural feeling. It shows how bootless it is to give account. I care more for your opinion than any other, but even your scorn does not signify to me here. It misses the point. The only pride that is involved is pride in my own immutability. Love ought always to be a regeneration,” he went on, as if putting into shape the thoughts that were rising out of the recent chaos in his mind. “It’s easy enough to keep true when the love, the joy, the equal give and take, go on unbroken. It’s when a man actually turns and walks out of heaven, and the gates shut behind him forever, that he finds out the stuff that’s in him. Sometimes, when I think about it, I try to fancy what would be my humiliation if I found I had grown to love her less.”
Martha was silent a moment. Then she said, as if urged by the necessity of speaking out, for this once, all that she had so long kept back:
“Suppose, after you get the divorce, you should hear that she was married?”
“I’m braced to bear that, if it comes,” he said. “I know it is possible, but I don’t fear it. I may, of course, be wrong; but I don’t believe, with what has been between us, that she could ever be the wife of another man while I lived. She might think so. She might even try—go part of the way; but I never felt more secure of anything than that she would find herself unable to do it.”
“Then do you think that she possibly still cares for you?”
“No; I’m not a fool. She made that point sufficiently plain. Didn’t she tell me, in the downright, simple words, that she did not love me—had never loved me—had found out it was all a mistake? I believe she meant it absolutely. I believe it was true. You don’t suppose, if I doubted it, I’d have given her up as I have done?”
“Oh, Harold, what was it all about, that quarrel that you had? Could you bear to tell me?”