"Too late! Too late!"
"Is it because my good looks are gone? Why, O, why cannot you love me again, unless it is because my good looks are gone?"
"No; your good looks have no weight in the matter. I could not forgive you if I loved you in the old way."
"Then," she cried, rising and stretching forth her arms wildly towards him, "do not forgive me; revile me, abuse me, yes, beat me, but tell me you love me as you did long ago; for I love you now above anything and all things on earth. Yes, ten thousand times better than I love my child! I never knew you until now. I was too giddy and vain and shallow to understand you. I have behaved to you worse than a murderess. But, Frank, I would die for you now!" She flung herself on her knees on the floor, and raised her clasped hands above her streaming face to him. "On my knees I ask you in the name of merciful Heaven to give me back your love, as I had it once! Give it to me for a little while, and then I shall be content to die. You are noble enough to forgive me and to take me back into your house. Take me back into your heart too. Raise me up and take me in your arms once, and then I will kill myself, if you wish it; I shall then die content. Refill my empty veins with words of love and I will trouble you no more. I have been walking blindfold in the desert all my life, and now that the bandages are taken off my eyes and I can see the promised land, am I to find I can never enter it? I am only a weak, wicked woman. You have extended to me forgiveness that makes you a god. Have for me, a weak woman, the pity of a god."
"I am no longer a man," he said, leaning against the wall. "I am smoke, an abstraction, a thing, an idea, a code. You are my wife and I will not cast a stone at you. You are my wife, and you are entitled to the shelter of my roof and the protection of my name. I make you free of both. But when you ask for love such as once was yours, I fail to catch the meaning of your words. You are speaking a language the import of which is lost to me. It is not that I will not, but that I cannot, give you what you ask. There would have been no meaning in the love I offered you years ago if I could offer you love now. Get up. It was with a view to avoiding a scene I spoke."
"I will not get up until you tell me there is hope--that some day you may relent."
"There is no question of relenting. When you left me you destroyed in me the faculty of loving you. Now get up. We have had enough of this. We must have no more. I have been betrayed into saying things I determined not even to refer to. Get up, and, mind, no more of this." With strong, firm arms he raised her from her knees.
She stood for a moment, leaning one hand on the table to steady herself. Then in a low quavering whisper, she said, "Is there any, any hope?"
"There is none."
She raised herself, and moved with uncertain feet to the door. "It would have been better I went to the river last night."