"A claim?"
"Well, let's say it entitles me to a hearing. You don't seem to realise, in the least, my extreme forbearance. I never reproached you. I never interfered between you and Lucy. You can't say I didn't play the game."
"I'm not saying it. I know you didn't betray me."
"Betray you? My dear child, I helped you. I never dreamed of standing in your way as long as there was a chance of your marrying. Now that there is none——"
"That has nothing to do with it. I told you that I wouldn't go back to you in any case."
"Come, I don't propose to throw you over for any other woman. Surely it would be more decent to come back to me than to go off with some other man, heaven knows whom, which is what you must do—eventually?"
"It's what I won't do. I'm not going back to that. Don't you see that's why I won't go back to you?"
Her apathy had become exhaustion. The flat, powerless voice, dying of its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight. There was only one way in which he could hold her.
"Kitty," he said, "is that really why you won't come back?"
"Yes; that's why. Anything—anything but that."