"Then—can't you?"
"Divorce, you mean?"
Paul came back to her, and she saw that he was even more shaken than she. He spoke thickly, painfully. He had never thought that he would do such a thing. God knew, he said without irreverence, that he did not believe in divorce. Not usually. But in this case—He had never thought he could love another man's wife. He had tried not to. But she was so alone. And he had loved her long ago. She had not forgotten that? It hadn't been easy to keep on all these years without her. And then when she had been treated so, and he couldn't do anything.
But it wasn't altogether that. Not all unselfish, "I—I've wanted you so! You don't know how I've wanted you. Nobody ever seems to think that a man wants to be loved and have somebody caring just about him, somebody that's glad when he comes home, and that—that cares when he's blue. We—we aren't supposed to feel like that. But we do. I do—terribly. Not just 'somebody.' It's always been you I wanted. Nobody else. Oh, there were girls. I even tried to think that maybe—but somehow, none of them were you. I couldn't help coming back."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said, with tears on her cheeks.
Perhaps, after all, forgetting the past and the things that had been between them, they could come together again and be happy. But he was tortured by a dread of being unfair to Bert. If she did still care for him, if he had any rights.—"Of course he has rights. He's your—I never thought that I could talk like this to a woman who hadn't any right to listen to me."
"Hush! Of course I have a right to listen to you. I have every right to do as I please with myself."
The tragedy that shook her was that it was true, that all the passion and beauty of her old love for Bert was dead, lying like a corpse in her heart, never to be awakened and never utterly forgotten. "I will be free," she promised, knowing that she never would be. But in her deepest tenderness toward Paul she could shut her eyes to that.
The promise made him happy. Despite his doubts, his restless conscience not quite silenced, he was happy, and his happiness was reflected in her. Something of magic revived, making the moment glamorous. She need not think of the future; she need made no promises beyond that one. "I will be free." A year, a year at least. Then they would plan.
For the moment her tenderness enfolded him, who loved her so much, so much that she could never give him enough to repay him. It came to her in a clear flash of thought through one of their silences that the maternal quality in a woman's love is not so much due to the mother in the woman as to the child in the man.