'I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,' she said. And that was the most galling part of it. Mine was an attitude of studied offensiveness. I did want to hurt her feelings. But hers, it seemed to me, was no pose. She really had had—and, I suppose, still retained—a genuine horror of me. The struggle was unequal.
'You were very kind,' she went on, 'sometimes—when you happened to think of it.'
Considered as the best she could find to say of me, it was not an eulogy.
'Well,' I said, 'we needn't discuss what I was or did five years ago. Whatever I was or did, you escaped. Let's think of the present. What are we going to do about this?'
'You think the situation's embarrassing?'
'I do.'
'One of us ought to go, I suppose,' she said doubtfully.
'Exactly.'
'Well, I can't go.'
'Nor can I.'