“You have lied to me ...” he was saying. “You have never cared at all....” And again the reproach. “You are like all your women ... cold ... magnificent ... not worthy of love.” He came nearer to her. “I will love you.... I will teach you what love can be.... What does he know of love ...? Nothing.... I will give you a happiness such as you never dreamed of.... I ... I am a lover.... I know these things.”
And then he went down suddenly upon his knees, the steel gone swiftly from his voice; the warmth and tenderness flowing back. “You will not refuse me.” He leaned forward and pressed his head against her. “You cannot.... I will give you everything ... all the things which he cannot give you....” And again he took her hands and this time kissed them passionately in a fashion that frightened her and filled her with the old weakness.
The spectacle of his humility, of this sudden collapse of what to her was his dignity, his will, his strength, astonished and embarrassed her. In her coldness it seemed to her incredible that any woman, least of all herself, should possess such power over any man. It was all unreal, beyond belief, and yet it fed her pride and gave her strength with which, one might have said, to destroy her own happiness, to resist the force of circumstances, even of nature, as she had defied it once before in marrying Clarence.
At last he rested his head against her knee and she bent over him, touching his dark hair with gentle fingers.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.... Please don’t.... It is no good. I know better than you.... I should always be thinking of him.... I should never be happy, so neither of us could be happy. There are some things which I cannot do ... and this is one. It is impossible.”
They said nothing more. Richard remained kneeling with his head against her knees and slowly the old peace which she had not known in months took possession of her, heightened now by a new knowledge of her completeness and power. It was a kind of satisfaction which was new to her, an emotion which was heady and intoxicating. She was uplifted, free now of Callendar, free of Clarence, free of everything in all the world ... alone, liberated, triumphant. She had defeated them all. And when he turned toward her for the last time there was a look in her eyes which said, “It is no use. You need have no hope. It can never be.”
On leaving, he kissed her hand, gently this time as if the passion had gone out of him. All he said was, “I shall do then what they expect of me. Some day you may wish for what you have thrown away.... I don’t imagine a thing like this happens every day.”
He was polite but, like herself, he was unbroken. He appeared to have regained possession of himself, to have become cold and calm and even a trifle indifferent. That was all he said and when he had gone the sight of his back, so slim, so strong, so inscrutable, filled her with a sudden weakness, for she knew that she had closed the door not alone upon Callendar but upon his mother, upon Sabine, upon the big house on Murray Hill, upon all that she had built up with such terrible patience.
He did what was expected of him. In a fortnight there appeared in the newspapers an announcement of the engagement of Richard Callendar to Sabine Cane. It described the great fortune of the prospective bridegroom and enlarged upon the social position of the happy couple. On the same day there was a paragraph apprising the world of the fact that Thérèse Callendar had sailed as usual to spend the remainder of the year abroad. But there was nothing said of the girl whom the world had seen lunching with Richard Callendar in Sherry’s. She was talked of, to be sure, in the circles in which Mrs. Champion and the Virgins, Mrs. Mallinson and the Apostle to the Genteel, were shining lights. They agreed that it must have been the clever Thérèse who disposed of the girl (perhaps paid her well) and made the match she desired; and they predicted with some satisfaction an unhappy life for Sabine. But Sabine in the end had won her game of patience, though she never knew the reason.