“What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?”
Her manner had changed. The hostility had gone out of it. Her husky voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.
“I mean just this: my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed to pieces by a child, my own dead child. I’m not going to allow my life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy. Isn’t a man more than a child? Can’t he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can give? Isn’t a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing that’s immature?”
He spoke with almost passionate resentment.
“D’you mean to tell me that a man’s love always means less to a woman than a child’s love means?”
Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy. The one was dead; the other could not die. That was the difference between such things.
“The two are so different that it is useless to compare them,” she replied. “Surely you could not be jealous of a child.”
“I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you. It’s all I’ve got now, and I won’t have it interfered with.”
“But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,” she said, very calmly.
“You dragged me into your life with Jimmy. You have always used Jimmy as a means. It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge’s.”