"Let's stick to facts. I do dream of it. I want to."
"But you disapprove of everything I do, you think I'm vulgar, cheap. Oh, you've said it, Jack; you've used those words. They hurt much too much for me to forget them easily."
"I'm sorry to have hurt you," he interrupted. "But I think you have come round to my way of thinking."
"I'll forget them—I'll try to," she went on, gabbling her speech murderously. "This is much too important for us to think about our own wretched little amour propre; and, when you say I'm "big," I always hope it means that I'm generous, forgiving. But, Jack, you despise me—or you did—the woman that you want to be the mother of your children——"
"You have changed. Otherwise I shouldn't want to marry you."
Barbara walked to the edge of the loggia and stood with her hands on the stone parapet, looking down on to the shadowy foliage of the gardens. She could no longer force into service the speech that she had rehearsed and at any moment she might expect to hear him say—in his horrible jury voice—"Then am I to understand that you never meant anything seriously, that this was all an elaborate trick? Was that your means of vindicating yourself? And do you feel that it has been successful?" He shewed a disconcerting mastery and a no less disconcerting restraint; she was not allowed to interrupt, and, when he had posed a question, he held her to it, waiting silently for an answer and blocking the loop-holes of irrelevancy.
"Why do you say you can't marry me?"
She turned to find that he was still by the table; he had risen as she rose, but without following her, without disturbing his deadly, businesslike composure.
"We should be miserable."