“You’re pretending, Magdalen!” he accused her sulkily. “None of those things matter and half of them aren’t true, especially about your being a ‘marked’ woman because of me. Those things are only true of people who live in restaurants, and you and I have scarcely been in one together since I saw you with Rodney West that night.” He was very young and very sulky.
“What is it all about, Magdalen?” he asked miserably. A year had passed, and this was their first scene—their first scene! No ordinary year, that....
“But, Ivor, I don’t want you to wake up one morning—to find no Magdalen and no friends!” She jerked the thing out....
“Why no Magdalen?” he stabbed at her.
“But that’s childish, you sweet!”
His eyes would not meet hers, he looked blackly at the table, waiting.... If only he would meet her eyes she would make it all right, he would understand. She knew herself so well ... sometimes. But he was so young!
“I don’t see why,” he said at last, to his plate.
“There’s a fatality about my kind of love,” Magdalen said softly, miserably, heroically. “It ends.” And in that moment Magdalen loved Ivor as she had never before loved him; she was like that.
“Mine doesn’t.”
Silence....