"Won't you listen to me?" he said at last, "I sha'n't ever trouble you again."
She could make no reply. Intolerable gratitude and pain held her, and he went on speaking, gazing straight into her shrinking face.
"It seems to me," he said slowly, "the people who grow up in the dry and mean habit of mind that I grew up in, break through in all sorts of different ways. Art and religion—I suppose they change and broaden a man. I don't know. I am not an artist—and religion talks to me of something I don't understand. To me, to know you has broken down the walls, opened the windows. It always used to come natural to me—well! to think little of people, to look for the mean, ugly things in them, especially in women. The only people I admired were men of action—soldiers, administrators; and it often seemed to me that women hampered and belittled them. I said to myself, one mustn't let women count for too much in one's life. And the idea of women troubling their heads with politics, or social difficulties, half amused, half disgusted me. At the same time I was all with Fontenoy in hating the usual philanthropic talk about the poor. It seemed to be leading us to mischief—I thought the greater part of it insincere. Then I came to know you.—And, after all, it seemed a woman could talk of public things, and still be real—the humanity didn't rub off, the colour stood! It was easy, of course, to say that you had a personal motive—other people said it, and I should have liked to echo it. But from the beginning I knew that didn't explain it. All the women,"—he checked himself,—"most of the women I had ever known judged everything by some petty personal standard. They talked magnificently, perhaps, but there was always something selfish and greedy at bottom. Well, I was always looking for it in you! Then instead—suddenly—I found myself anxious lest what I said should displease or hurt you—lest you should refuse to be my friend. I longed, desperately, to make you understand me—and then, after our talks, I hated myself for posing, and going further than was sincere. It was so strange to me not to be scoffing and despising."
Marcella woke from her trance of pain—looked at him with amazement. But the sight of him—a man, with the perspiration on his brow, struggling now to tell the bare truth about himself and his plight—silenced her. She hung towards him again, as pale as he, bearing what fate had sent her.
"And ever since that day," he went on, putting his hand over his eyes, "when you walked home with me along the river, to be with you, to watch you, to puzzle over you, has built up a new self in me, that strains against and tears the old one. So these things—these heavenly, exquisite things that some men talk of—this sympathy, and purity, and sweetness—were true! They were true because you existed—because I had come to know something of your nature—had come to realise what it might be—for a man to have the right—"
He broke off, and buried his face in his hands, murmuring incoherent things. Marcella rose hurriedly, then stood motionless, her head turned from him, that she might not hear. She felt herself stifled with rising tears. Once or twice she began to speak, and the words died away again. At last she said, bending towards him:
"I have done very ill—very, very ill. I have been thinking all through of my personal want—of personal victory."
He shook his head, protesting. And she hardly knew how to go on. But suddenly the word of nature, of truth, came; though in the speaking it startled them both.
"Sir George!"—she put out her hand timidly and touched him—"may I tell you what I am thinking of? Not of you, nor of me—of another person altogether!"
He looked up.