Thus the melancholy, stammering flow, till it, as usual, choked itself and died.
She heard it out in silence—as always. This silent hearing was the carrying out of what had from the first constituted their intercourse. For always he had talked and she had heard; Betty had once quite failed to accept Tommy's assertion that it was ever 'the other way round.' But the silence seemed now to hold a new element—the element of receptiveness. She listened wholly, swerving from nothing. It seemed that here was his triumph, long striven for; he had sounded the personal note and she had accepted it; in a manner, he had broken through the gates.
When the stammered flow broke, she continued the silence for a little. Then she assented to his last phrase, saying, very gently:
'No—I can't say anything. There is nothing to say.'
The sad, judicial candour of it set the seal on the position. If he had still wildly, faintly hoped that she had not, perhaps, seen so utterly 'how they stood, how they must always stand,' that hope died then. He had divined so much correctly; there might even, perhaps, be more of it, that it would take some years yet to divine.
The glow of the coloured city made his eyes ache as he looked.
He said again, what seemed to be the final expression of the situation between them, this time altering the pronoun:
'There is nothing I can say.'
All he might have said, all he now knew that he would have said, had they stood differently in each other's eyes, all that it would have been, as they did stand, an insolence to say, seemed to lie in the silence between them. Since she was (now) so receptive, she possibly took it in, or a little of it. But 'there is nothing to say' finally summed the situation.
Tommy stammered 'Good-bye,' and went.