"Please go on, Quentin."
Her manner disconcerted him. He could not understand her alternations between hysteria and stolid calm.
"You mustn't think I don't realise I've behaved like a skunk. But I don't want to dwell on it—it would only be putting mud on my face to make you pity me—but I do ask you to try to understand me.... Janey, I've done this for your good as well as mine. You shared the misery and ruin of my love. In saving myself, I've saved you too. Janey, Janey—don't you see that our love was nothing but a rotten sickness of the soul?"
He looked at her anxiously, but her face was expressionless as wood.
"You and I have always been more or less wretched together, and though at first I felt our unhappiness was doing us good—strengthening us and purifying us—of late I felt it was doing us harm, it was disorganising and unmanning us...."
He paused—even an outburst of fury or denial would have been welcome.
"To begin with," he continued in an uncertain voice, "I thought it was the hopelessness of it all that was making it so dreadful, but when our marriage was actually in sight—of hope, at least—I felt matters were only getting worse. My thoughts were like sand and fire—my love was like the salt water I compared it to long ago, with madness in each draught. I felt our marriage would be a bigger hell than anything that had gone before it—and yet, I wanted you! Oh, God! I wanted you!"
She bowed forward suddenly, over her clenched hands.
"Janey, Janey—I don't want to hurt you more than I must. It's not your fault that every thought of you was fire and poison to me. You were just a weapon in fate's hands to wound me—we were both in fate's hands, to wound each other."