“To you least of all,” she said. “Only yourself has ever really mattered to you.”
In a sentence she summed up the long catalogue that had been given to him by her silence.
His whole body felt as if it reddened. His skin tingled with a sort of physical anger. His mature pride that had grown always, as a strong man’s natural pride does grow with the passing of the years, seemed to him instinctively to rush forward to return the blow that had been dealt it.
“That is not quite true,” he said.
“It is true. I have always had copper and I have always wanted gold,” she answered.
He controlled himself, to prove to himself that she lied, that he was not the eternal egoist she dubbed him. Sometimes he had been genuinely unselfish, sometimes—not often, perhaps, but sometimes—he had really sunk himself in her. She was not being quite just. But how could she be quite just to-night? An almost reckless feeling overtook him, a desire to conquer at all costs in this struggle; to win her back, whether against her will or not, to her old self; to eliminate the shocking impression made upon her soul by the discovery of that day, to wipe it out utterly, to replace it with another; to revive within her that beautiful enthusiasm which had been as a light always shining for her and from her upon people and events and life; to make her understand, to prove to her that, after all allowance has been made for uncertainties and contradictions of fate, for the ironies, the paradoxes, the cruelties, the tragedies, and the despairs of existence, the great, broad fact emerges, that what the human being gives, in the long run the human being generally gets, and that she who persistently gives gold will surely at last receive it.
The thought of a lost Hermione struck to his heart a greater fear than had already that night the thought of a dead Hermione. And if she was changed she was lost.
The real, the beautiful Hermione—he must seize her, grip her, hold her fast before it was too late.
“Hermione,” he said, “I think you saved me from death; I am sure you did. Did you save me only to hate me?”
She made no reply.