Barbara pressed her hands against her cheeks, throwing her head back and closing her eyes.
"I wish I could," she whispered. "I was trying to, trying to make you doubt it so that you wouldn't mind so much. If I could have made you think that we were just friends.... Jack, you must—before it's too late. You've made a mistake, you're exaggerating everything! Just because you've hardly met a girl before, you think you're in love with me. Because I'm pretty, because I amuse you ... I'll be ever so humble! I'm nothing—nothing but a great friend. If you go away, you'll see it like that; when you come back, we shall still be friends, but you'll wonder how you ever imagined you were in love with me. You're not, Jack! You must tell yourself you're not."
"I don't understand, Barbara."
"I'm trying to help you. I can never marry you; and I want you to see that you're not losing anything. You don't really want me. Oh, you don't, Jack!"
"Why do you say you can never marry me? Don't you love me?"
Barbara had expected the question for so long that it had lost half its force before reaching her. Her mind moved quickly, as it had done all the evening, and she could anticipate Jack's slow change of expression, his dawning realization and then her punishment. There was no give-and-take, when he lectured or attacked; no neatness of phrase, no delicacy of sarcasm or irony, no intellectual joy of battle. He dealt the bludgeon blows of one who seemed to boast that he was not clever but tried to be honest. She felt suddenly frightened for her pride and for herself; and she knew that he would beat her as conscientiously as he had tried to win her.
"Love isn't everything," she answered.
"I'm waiting to be told what the obstacle is."
In another moment he would have summarized for the third time all possible objections to the marriage and his own complacent disposal of them. She could not bear that again.