"I have never told you how it was over there all these years. I could not speak of it…. I thought we should be enough, as you say. We had our love and our music…. But we weren't enough, almost from the start. She was unhappy. She really wanted those things we had given up, which she might have had if it had been otherwise—I mean if she had been my wife. I was too much of a fool to see that at once. I didn't want divorce and marriage—there were difficulties in the way, too. We had thrown over the world, defied it. I didn't care to sneak back into the fold…. Our love turned bad. All the sentiment and lofty feeling somehow went out of it. We became two animals, tied together first by our passion, and afterwards by—the situation. I can't tell you all. It was killing…. It did kill the best in me."
"It was her fault. The woman makes the kind of love always."
"No, she might have been different, another way! But I tell you the facts. She became dissatisfied, restless. She was unfaithful to me. I knew it, and I shielded her—because in part I had made her what she was. But it was awful. And at the end she went away with that other man. He will leave her. Then she'll take another…. Love turns sour, I tell you—love taken that way. Life becomes just curdled milk. And it eats you like poison. Look at me,—the marrow of a man is all gone!"
"Dear Vick, it was all her fault. Any decent woman would have made you happy,—you would have worked, written great music,—lived a large life."
His story did not touch her except with pity for him. To her thinking each case was distinct, and her lips curved unconsciously into a smile, as if she were picturing how different it would be with them….
The fog had broken, and was rising from the meadows below, revealing the trees and the sun. The birds had begun to sing in the beeches. It was fresh and cool and moist before the warmth of the coming day. Isabelle drew deep breaths and loosened her scarf.
Vickers sat silent, miserable. As he had said to Alice, the wreck of his life, where he had got knowledge so dearly, availed nothing when most he would have it count for another.
"No, Vick! Whatever happens it will be our own fate, nobody's else—and I want it!"
There was cool deliberation in her tone as if the resolve had been made already.
"Not John's fate, too?"