She said very sweetly and pitifully: "Dear, I know what people suffer—what lonely hearts endure. I think I understand what you have been through."
"I know you understand! Fool that I am who enlightened you. But yours was the injury of bruised faith—the suffering caused by outrage. No hell of self-contempt set you crawling about the world in agony; no despicable self-knowledge drove you out into the waste places. Yours was the sorrow of a
self-respecting victim; mine the grief of the damned fool who has done to death all that he ever loved for the love of expediency and of self!"
"Clive!—"
"That's what I am!" he interrupted fiercely, "a damned fool! I don't know what else I am, but I can't live without you, and I won't!"
She said: "You told me that being in love with me would not make you unhappy. So I told you to love me. I was wrong to let you do it."
"You darling! I am more than happy!"
"It was a dreadful mistake, Clive! I shouldn't have let you."
"Do you think you could have stopped me?"
"I don't know. Couldn't I? I've stopped other men.... I shouldn't have let you. But it was so delightful—to be really loved by you! All my pride responded. It seemed to dignify everything; it seemed to make me really a woman, with a place among other women—to be loved by such a man as you ... and I was not selfish about it; I did ask you whether it would make you unhappy to be in love with me. Oh, I see now that I was very wrong, Clive—very foolish, very wrong! Because it is making you restless and unhappy—"