"Wait?" Belter laughed mirthlessly. "All right. I know how to wait. Waiting is the best thing I do. I've waited for nearly three years before I've told myself the truth. I've told it now, to myself, and to you.... But it's too late to tell it to her."
"Do you think it is?"
Belter looked up in pallid surprise:
"Of course."
"I wonder," mused Cleland.
Belter's sunken gaze had become remote and fixed again. He said, half to himself:
"I couldn't let her alone. I couldn't learn to mind my own business. I'd been bawling aloud my theories for years, Cleland, but I couldn't apply them to her or to myself. I bragged about my mania for personal liberty, for tolerance; I lauded the maxim of 'hands off.' But I couldn't keep my meddling hands off her; I couldn't understand that she had the right to personal liberty—freedom in the pursuit of happiness. No; I tried to head her off, check her, stampede her into the common corral whither all men's wives are supposed to be driven—tried to rope her and throw her and blindfold, hobble and break her to suit myself.... And, Cleland, do you know what happened? I found I had come upon a character, a mind, a personality which would not endure the tyranny we men call domestic affection.... That's what I discovered.... And I did not do the breaking. No; she has accomplished that. And—here I am, to admit it to you.... And I think I'll go, now——"
Cleland walked slowly to the door with him, one arm resting on his shoulder:
"I wish you'd tell her what you've told me, Harry."
"It's too late. She wouldn't care, now."