She hesitated.
“Don’t you?” he repeated.
“We needn’t use ugly words,” she said at last.
“For ugly things? I believe it’s best. You hate me and I hate you. D’you know why I hate you? Not because you deliberately made me care for you with my body, in the beastly, wholly physical way, but because you wouldn’t let the other thing alone.”
“The other thing?”
“Haven’t we got something else as well as the body? Look here—before I ever knew you I was always trying to build. At first I tried to build for a possible future which might never come. Well, it did come, and I was glad I’d stuck to my building—sometimes when it was difficult. Then I tried to build for—for my wife—and then my child came and I tried to build for him, too. So it went on. I was always building, or trying to. In South Africa I was doing it, and I came back feeling as if I’d got something to show, not much, but something, for my work. Then the crash came, and I thought I knew sorrow and horror down to the bones. But I didn’t. I’ve only got to know them to the bones here. You’ve made me know them. If you’d loved me I should never have complained, have attacked you, been brutal to you; but when I think that you’ve never cared a rap about me, never cared for anything but my body, and that—that——” his voice broke for a moment; then he recovered himself and went on, more harshly,—“and that merely from desire, or whatever you choose to call it, you’ve sent the last stones of my building to dust, I sometimes feel as if I could murder you. If you meant to kick me out and be free of me when you had had enough of me, you should never have brought Jimmy into the matter; for in a way you could never understand Jimmy was linked up with my boy, with Robin. When you made me earn Jimmy’s hatred by being utterly false to all I really was, you separated me from my boy. I killed him, but till then I was sometimes near him. Ever since that night of lying and dirty pretense he’s—he’s—I’ve lost him. You’ve taken my boy from me. Why should I leave you yours?”
“But you’re mad—when my boy’s alive and—”
“And so’s mine!”
She stared at him in silence.
“You can’t give him back to me. Jimmy shrinks from me not because of what I’ve done, but because of what I’ve become, and my boy feels as Jimmy does. He—he——”