“I don’t want to believe I am only one among many,” he said at last.
The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling. She had been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had brought him to it. She did not understand that now, but she knew that he was asking from her more than he had ever asked before. He had been cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door. He was knocking, but lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness. Still, while he knocked, he looked back to the other life. Nevertheless—she knew this with all there was of woman in her—he wanted from her all that the good woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any one. He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was now tormented ceaselessly. The sound of his voice demanded from her something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him of what he had lived by through all his years. Nevertheless he was still looking back to all the old purities, was still trying to hear all the old voices. He required of her, as it were, that she should be good in her evil, gentle while she destroyed. Well, she would even be that. A rare smile curved her thin lips, but he did not see it.
“Suppose I told you that you were one of many?” she said. “Would you give it all up?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“No. Do you think, if you were, I should have kept my women friends, Tippie Chetwinde, Delia Ingleton and all the rest?”
“I suppose not,” he said.
But he remembered tones in Mrs. Chetwinde’s voice when she had spoken of “Cynthia Clarke,” and even tones in Lady Ingleton’s voice.
“They stuck to me because they believed in me. What other reason could they have?”
“Unless they were very devoted to you.”
“Women aren’t much given to that sort of thing,” she said dryly.