"I wanted to explain everything to you," she said in a low voice, as she came near to him. "I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt. I didn't mean to be hard. But I am still so tired—and everything that one says, and feels, hurts so."
She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.
"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter that I wrote you the day before—?"
"Yes."
"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your grief—your suffering—or to the suffering of any human being for whom you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"
"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have done."
"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you desire so passionately for others—freedom of conscience—freedom of judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have refused me the commonest right of love—the right to show you myself, to prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion—misery, much more, oh, much more to me than to you!—I was in truth bent on the same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same goal."
"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry—that there was a struggle in your mind—that you pitied me—pitied them. But you judged it all from above—you looked down—and I could not see that you had any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I was below—in the midst—close to the horror and anguish of them."
"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I not offer—entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me—prevented us.—However, let me take that point first. Would you,"—he spoke deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me? You owe it to me to answer."
She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last in this white heat of an accusing passion. In return she began to forget her own resolve to bear herself gently.