Without answering him she bent over and picked up a half sheet of the morning newspaper from the floor, and after glancing at it, held it out to him. “There is an article there about you,” she said in a low voice; “it says you have refused the State Department; is that true?”
He put the paper aside with a little impatience. “Of course it’s true,” he said; “I refused it three days ago.”
She was again silent for an instant while she folded the paper into plaits. “Why did you refuse it?” she asked.
Fox moved sharply and turned his face away, looking at the fire. “That does not concern us, Margaret,” he said gravely; “our marriage is the only question now; I—”
She interrupted him. “Tell me,” she insisted, “it’s my right to know; this had something to do with me, with the prospect of—of your marrying Wicklow’s divorced wife, I know it! Tell me the truth.”
“Of what avail?” he retorted with evident reluctance, his cheek red.
“I have a right to know,” she reiterated.
He smiled bitterly. “The situation is quite clear, isn’t it? I can’t take White’s place in the Cabinet and White’s wife; it would be monstrous.”
She leaned back in her chair, shading her face with her thin hand which trembled slightly, she tried to speak, but her dry lips refused to move. His manner, no less than his words, had ruthlessly torn away the last shreds of her self-deception, and her poor shivering soul shuddered at this revelation of the hardness in him, the eternal note of egoism. How plain it was, how simple, how inexorable! The man’s love had died, and hers had fed itself upon a chimera, a phantasm of her imagination, a dream of the past! Her hand trembled so that she let it fall in her lap and averted her face.
Something of the anguish she felt reached him; he perceived her thought without knowing that he had laid bare his heart to her, and he felt a pang of remorse for his words, though she had wrung them from him with a woman’s besotted madness, a woman’s wild determination to probe her own agony to the core.