"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"
"I've told you why."
"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you——"
He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the physician who knew her malady.
"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be worst of all."
And so he left her.
II
He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him alone and insisted on his letting her alone.
This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.