“Are you—certain?”
“I think I may be—now.”
“Yet,” she said timidly, “you lost one fight—since you knew me.”
The dull red mantling his face wrung her heart. She turned impulsively and laid both hands on his shoulders. “That chance I would take, with all its uncertainty, all the dread inheritance you have come into. I love you enough for that; and if it turned out that—that you could not stem the tide, even with me to face it with you; and if the pity of it, the grief of it, killed me, I would take that chance—if you loved me through it all.... But there is something else. Hush; let me have my say while I find the words—something else you do not understand.... Turn your face a little; please don't look at me. This is what you do not know—that, in three generations, every woman of my race has—gone wrong.... Every one! and I am beginning—with such a marriage!... deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of the race record behind me.
“Once, when I knew nothing—before I—I met you—I believed such a marriage would not only permit me mental tranquillity, but safely anchor me in the harbour of convention, leaving me free to become what I am fashioned to become—autocrat and arbiter in my own world. And now! and now! I don't know—truly I don't know what I may become. Your love forces my hand. I am displaying all the shallowness, falseness, pettiness, all the mean, and cruel and callous character which must be truly my real self.... Only I shall not marry you! You are not to run the risk of what I might prove to be when I remember in bitterness all I have renounced. If I married you I should remember, unreconciled, what you cost me. Better for you and for me that I marry him, and let him bear with me when I remember that he cost me you!”
She bent over, almost double, closing her eyes with small clenched hands; and he saw the ring shimmering in the sunshine, and her hair, heavily, densely gold, and the white nape of her neck, and the tiny close-set ears, and the curved softness of cheek and chin; every smooth, childlike contour and mould—rounded arms, slim, flowing lines of body and limb—all valued at many millions by her as her own appraiser.
Suddenly, deep within him, something seemed to fail, die out—perhaps a tiny newly lighted flame of unaccustomed purity, the dawning flicker of aspiration to better things. Whatever it was, material, spiritual, was gone now, and where it had glimmered for a night, the old accustomed twilit doubt crept in—the same dull acquiescence—the same uncertainty of self, the familiar lack of will, of incentive, the congenial tendency to drift; and with it came weariness—perhaps reaction from the recent skirmishes with that master-vice.
“I suppose,” he said in a dull voice, “you are right.”
“No, I am wrong—wrong!” she said, lifting her lovely face and heavy eyes. “But I have chosen my path.... And you will forget.”
“I hope so,” he said simply.