"I know. It's because you haven't taken it in. What do you think of this? You've known me ten days, and ten days before that I was with Wilfrid Marston."
"'I want to make you loathe me ... never see me again.'"
He had taken it in at last. She had made it real to him, clothed it in flesh and blood.
"If you don't believe me," she said, "ask him. That's what he came to see me for. He wanted me to go back to him. In fact, I wasn't supposed to have left him."
He put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to steady his mind to face the thing that stunned it.
"And you're telling me all this because——" he said dully.
"Because I want to make you loathe me, so that you can go away and be glad that you'll never see me again. And if it hurts you too much to think of me as I am, to think that you cared for me, just say to yourself that I cared for you, and that I couldn't have done it if I'd been quite bad."
She cried out, "It would have been better for me if I had been. I shouldn't feel then. It wouldn't hurt me to see little children. I should have got over that long ago; and I shouldn't have cared for you or them. I shouldn't have been able to. We get like that. And then—I needn't have let you care for me. That was the worst thing I ever did. But I was so happy—so happy."