"Your children, Dick—I have forgotten that I have any. I have had my life. You have still yours to live."
She swept by him down the long room, everything in which was so closely associated with her. Before she reached the door, he was there—and his back against it. She stopped, but she did not look at him. If she could have read the truth in his face, it would have told her that she had never been loved as she was at that moment. All that she had been in her loyalty, her nobility, was so much a part of this man's life. What, compared to that, were petty sins, or big ones? He saw the past as a drowning man sees the panorama of his existence. Yet he knew that everything he could say would be powerless to move her.
It was useless to remind her of their happy years together. They could never be happy again with this between them. It would be equally useless to tell her that this other woman had known, but too well, that he would never desert his wife for her. Had he not betrayed her?
Of what use to tell her how he had repented his folly, that he could never understand it himself? There were the facts, and Nature, and his wife's philosophy against him.
And he had dared be gay the moment the steamer slid into the channel! Was that only this morning? It seemed to be in the last century.
She approached, and stretched her hand toward the door.
He did not move.
"Don't stop me," she pleaded. "Don't make it any harder than it is. Let me take with me the consolation of a decent life together—a decent life decently severed."
He made one last appeal—he opened his arms wide to her.
She shrank back with a shudder, crying out that he should spare her her own contempt—that he should leave her the power to seek peace—and her voice had such a tone of terror, as she recoiled from him, that he felt how powerless any protest would be.