“Poor—but—what do you mean?” he stammered.
He never turned his eyes from her face.
“Poor Robin!—but it isn’t your fault.”
Then she put out her hand and touched his gently.
“My fault?
“That it was all a fancy, all a weaving of words. You want to be what you thought you were, but you can’t be.”
“You’re wrong, Viola, you’re utterly wrong—”
“Hush, Robin! That woman you spoke of—that woman knows.”
He cleared his throat, got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At that moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an abject sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame. It was frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had thought he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything but plunge a sword into her heart. He longed to surround her with tenderness—yes, he was sure he longed—but he could only hold up to her in the sun her loneliness. And he had lost—what had he not lost? A dream of years, an imagination that had been his inseparable and dearest companion. His loneliness was intense in that moment as was hers. The tears seemed to scald his eyes. In his heart he cursed God for not permitting him to be what he longed to be, to feel what he longed to feel. It seemed to him monstrous, intolerable, that even our emotions are arranged for us as are arranged the events of our lives. He felt like a doll, a horrible puppet.
“Poor old Robin!”