He must have known that it was too late now to ask such a thing. An hour earlier, before Fergus had intruded upon them, he might have succeeded. But everything was changed now. For an instant, during the time Fergus had been there, she had caught a glimpse of the old, familiar Richard, the mocking one; and the sense of conflict had risen once more sharply between them.
“How could I do that?” she asked, and after a moment’s silence, “I can’t do that sort of thing. It is impossible for me....”
He smiled. “But the world believes it of you already. The world will not care. The world expects it of you. It can make no difference ... and when the divorce is finished we will be married.”
Her answer was colored with a sudden bitterness. “You would not have said such a thing to me once.”
It was true. There was a difference now, of a kind she had not thought of before. It was a difference which had to do with age and all the slow hardening which had come with each year that stood between them and the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms. Something had gone from them both ... the warmth, the gallantry, the glow that had made him then so reckless, so willing to marry her, a poor nobody, in the face of all his world. It was gone from her too.... She knew exactly what it was now. It was the thing which she had felt slip from her as a cloak on the night she sat talking with Thérèse in the dark library on Murray Hill. They were no longer young. They weighed chances now, cynically looking upon their problem without regard for honor. The tragedy was that they could never go back. What was gone was gone forever. And in the memory of the fierce, youthful passion, so fresh and turbulent, this new love seemed to her an obscene and middle-aged emotion.
“No,” she repeated. “I can’t do that. It is to myself that it matters.... What the world thinks does not interest me.”
Long after midnight Callendar at last stirred himself and bade her good night. They had talked, long and passionately, over the same ground again and again, seeing it now in this light, now in that, arriving in the end nowhere at all; and through it all, Ellen must have caught once more the awful sense of his patience. He could wait; in the end he would have what he desired. And this she knew with an understanding that lay deeper than the mere surface of her consciousness.
Only it was all different now, even the significance of his patience, because time was rushing on and on past her. She was no longer a young girl; she was, as he had said, a woman of the world and therefore, perhaps, all the more desirable in her unchallenged, unbroken spirit.
“It is very late,” said Callendar gently, as the black dog stirred himself and, yawning, rubbed his head against Ellen’s hand. “And to-morrow....”
But she did not permit him to say, “And to-morrow I shall be back at the front.” She was afraid of his saying it, because all the evening she had been fighting just this thought. She understood that it was his strongest weapon, the one thing which might demolish the wall of her resistance. It was not a fair weapon, but he would not hesitate to use it where his own desire was concerned.