“Listen to me, Hugo—for if this mood of yours isn’t met now, in this horrible moment, it may ruin our lives——”
“May ruin!” But she held his arm tight.
“Yes, dear, this is ruin—but why won’t you face facts, why won’t you face the bogey that life has shaped to frighten us, why won’t you see that this is the culminating point of three ruined lives and that on the ruins of three lives we must now build a city for two? It won’t be a very fair city, Hugo, but it’s ours by right, by the only real right in this wrong world—the right of misery....”
Now the eyes of a man who sees a wraith are more frightening than the wraith that he sees. That is why Joan Loyalty left her sentence in the air, for it had been snapped by his stare.
“But aren’t you—sorry?” he whispered dryly.
And she laughed—her nerves laughed through her mouth.
“Sorry! You dare to ask me if I am sorry! Oh, Hugo, is it absolutely necessary for the love of a man for a woman to be expressed in fatuous questions? Oh, God, what kind of thing is this love that it tricks a mind into loving a man!”
“I don’t know what you mean ...” he muttered sulkily. Hugo Carr couldn’t bear not understanding things.
“You ask me if I am sorry—I, who have lived through a hell of boredom for eight years so as not to hurt Ralph’s feelings, not to break his heart! And now at last it’s broken. Yes, I am sorry. Frightfully sorry. And I am also glad—I feel as though I myself had died and that my soul had been freed from a long imprisonment. That is what I felt, as though it was I who was dead, when I saw him——”
He gaped at her idiotically.