“No.” Quite suddenly she weakened and collapsed, and her hands fell from him, and she hid her face in them and the tears came.
“No—don’t touch me, or I can’t say it. I know you care ... but there are so many ways of caring. There’s the way you care for me ... and the way ... the way you’ve always cared for ... her....”
Eddy stood and looked down at her as she crouched huddled in a chair, and spoke gently.
“There are many ways of caring. Perhaps one cares for each of one’s friends rather differently—I don’t know. But love is different from them all. And I love you, Molly. I have loved no one else, ever, in that sense.... I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand you. By ‘her’ I believe you mean Eileen Le Moine. Now can you look me in the face and say you think I care for Eileen Le Moine in—in that way? No, of course you can’t. You know I don’t; what’s more, you know I never did. I have always admired her, liked her, been fond of her, attracted to her. If you asked why I have never fallen in love with her, I suppose I should answer that it was, in the first instance, because she never gave me the chance. She has always, since I knew her, been so manifestly given over, heart and soul, to someone else. To fall in love with her would have been absurd. Love needs just the element of potential reciprocity; at least, for me it does. There was never that element with Eileen. So I never—quite—fell in love with her. That perhaps was my reason before I found I cared for you. After that, no reason was needed. I had found the real thing.... And now you talk of taking it away from me. Molly, say you don’t mean it; say so at once, please.” She had stopped crying, and sat huddled in the big chair, with downbent, averted face.
“But I do mean it, Eddy.” Her voice came small and uncertain through the fog-choked air. “Truly I do. You see, the things I hate and can’t get over are just nothing at all to you. We don’t feel the same about right and wrong.... There’s religion, now. You want me, and you’d want me more if we were married, to be friends with people who haven’t any, in the sense I mean, and don’t want any. Well, I can’t. I’ve often told you. I suppose I’m made that way. So there it is; it wouldn’t be happy a bit, for either of us.... And then there are the wrong things people do, and which you don’t mind. Perhaps I’m a prig, but anyhow we’re different, and I do mind. I shall always mind. And I shouldn’t like to feel I was getting in the way of your having the friends you liked, and we should have to go separate ways, and though you could be friends with all my friends—because you can with everyone—I couldn’t with all yours, and we should hate it. You want so many more kinds of things and people than I do; I suppose that’s it.” (Arnold Denison, who had once said, “Her share of the world is homogeneous; his is heterogeneous,” would perhaps have been surprised at her discernment, confirming his.)
Eddy said, “I want you. Whatever else I want, I want you. If you want me—if you did want me, as I thought you did—it would be enough. If you don’t.... But you do, you must, you do.”
And it was no argument. And she had reason and logic on her side, and he nothing but the unreasoning reason of love. And so through the dim afternoon they fought it out, and he came up against a will firmer than his own, holding both their loves in check, a vision clearer than his own, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, till at last the vision was drowned in tears, and she sobbed to him to go, because she would talk no more. He went, vanquished and angry, out into the black, muffled city, and groped his way to Soho, like a man who has been robbed of his all and is full of bitterness but unbeaten, and means to get it back by artifice or force.
He went back next day, and the day after that, hammering desperately on the shut door of her resolve. The third day she left London and went home. He only saw Mrs. Crawford, who looked at him speculatively and with an odd touch of pity, and said, “So it’s all over. Molly seems to know her own mind. I dislike broken engagements exceedingly; they are so noticeable, and give so much trouble. One would have thought that in all the years you have known each other one of you might have discovered your incompatibility before entering into rash compacts. But dear Molly only sees a little at a time, and that extremely clearly. She tells me you wouldn’t suit each other. Well, she may be right, and anyhow I suppose she must be allowed to judge. But I am sorry.”
She was kind; she hoped he would still come and see them; she talked, and her voice was far away and irrelevant. He left her. He was like a man who has been robbed of his all and knows he will never get it back, by any artifice or any force.
On Sunday he went to Eileen. It seemed about a month ago that he had heard from Bridget asking him to do so. He found her listless and heavy-eyed, and yawning from lack of sleep. Gently he led her to talk, till Hugh Datcherd seemed to stand alive in the room, caressed by their allusions. He told her of people who missed him; quoted what working-men of the Settlement had said of him; discussed his work. She woke from apathy. It was as if, among a world that, meaning kindness, bade her forget, this one voice bade her remember, and remembered with her; as if, among many voices that softened over his name as with pity for sadness and failure, this one voice rang glorying in his success. Sheer intuition had told Eddy that that was what she wanted, what she was sick for—some recognition, some triumph for him whose gifts had seemed to be broken and wasted, whose life had set in the greyness of unsuccess. As far as one man could give her what she wanted, he gave it, with both hands, and so she clung to him out of all the kind, uncomprehending world.