“Besides, I am as miserable there as here. I want the impossible. I’m crying for the moon. I’ve cried for it—My God!—these twenty years. I wonder, Mrs. Collingwood, if you can understand a mood of savage self-dissatisfaction—a mood in which it seems indecent that you should be alive yourself, and unjust that so many million fellow-beings should find this world an agreeable place. There are times when I should like to be an Atlas poised on the gulf of space! How I’d send the old ball and all that dwell in it humming into the void, to go on and on into darkness! You know that poem of Byron’s—”
“Yes, I know the poem and the mood.” She regretted the statement as soon as she had made it, and bit her lips in silent confusion. Kingsnorth stopped and faced her. They stood close to a great clump of pandan bushes where a path, making a short cut from the cottages to the point, led away through the bunched sand grass.
“Are you going to draw that line on me forever, Mrs. Collingwood?” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kingsnorth.”
“Oh, yes, you do. I am Martin’s friend, Mrs. Collingwood. Am I never going to be yours?”
“Just as far as it is a friendship including Martin, yes. But why fence over the matter? The friendship which you would form with me excludes him. I should have poor powers of analysis, Mr. Kingsnorth, if I could not perceive that you have not been bidding for the friendship of a friend’s wife, as she is joined to his life and yours in the present. What you want is a friendship based on the past. You want to build something out of what we have both experienced and what he has not experienced, and I will have nothing of it.”
“I meant no disloyalty to him,” Kingsnorth muttered.
“Disloyalty; no! But would he feel his position a dignified one? Would he have no cause for complaint with both you and me?”
“You coddle him,” said Kingsnorth, with a short bitter laugh.
“I am jealous for all that touches his dignity as well as mine.”