“Mr. Dan, I do care for you, and if you ever needed me, as you did once, I would have to come to you, no matter where I was or what else was in my life. I mean it. But I have never really belonged to your life. There’s all the difference in the world between us, you know it and I know it. That’s why I didn’t want to marry you. And you know it now, too, you feel it the moment I come here into this room. Only you are very loyal, very kind and very generous, but it is so.”
“It wasn’t always so,” he cried impulsively, and then suddenly stopped, realizing what the admission had been.
“I belonged to you but I don’t belong to your life. I can’t. I don’t want to, Mr. Dan, it bores me. You don’t know how completely lonely I have been.”
“Inga,” he said, interrupting her, “it isn’t entirely that. You, too, are not telling the whole truth. Perhaps I understand you in this better than you do yourself. Frankly, you are not interested in me any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not interested,” he said, quietly, as though for the first time he were capable of standing apart and judging themselves impartially, “because you’ve finished your task, because there’s nothing more for you to do.”
“Yes, Mr. Dan, there is nothing more for me to do,” she said, sadly. “I can’t give you anything more. I don’t count. And the truth is, we’re just good friends. I suppose other marriages are happy like that. It is killing me.”
“It seems strange,” he continued, staring at her, “that there should be so little vanity in you. Other women would feel a sense of pride, of possession, of parading what they had accomplished, but not you. You were happiest, you only really loved me when I was trembling on the edge of the gutter, when you were the last hold which held me back, and now you miss that, you miss the dramatic side of it, the struggle, the tremendous tax on every nerve of your body, on every shred of your will. You’ve won out, you’ve made me and now I no longer interest you. You miss the struggle.”
“Oh, it is not simply that I miss it,” she cried, passionately; “it’s that I must have it. I’m that way, it’s my happiness. I should stifle if there was nothing in life for me to do.”
“I do not say it in bitterness,” said Dangerfield, “I am not bitter. I know now that you must follow your instinct and between the other man and myself you must go to the one who needs you now, as I used to need you, isn’t that so?”