"But then I should be injuring another man."
"He might rejoice to be rid of her. And here you're injuring yourself."
There was a long silence, and Loring tried to ease it by filling two tumblers with brandy and soda. Jack returned to his chair, drawing furiously at his cigar and rapidly smoothing the back of his head.
"I'm not going to give her up," he said at length.
"You can at least go away and think it over. Don't meet her. Work as you've never worked before. Mark you, the best thing is to go right away. She won't help you a bit. Women are cruel and women are selfish. If she's made up her mind that she can't marry you, she'll do the next best thing for herself and take good care that she gets all the time, attention, affection that she can out of you. And your nerves will crack. If you live within telephoning or writing distance, you're done for. I saw that for myself. When I got back to England a few months ago, I only consented to stay in London when I heard that Sonia had gone abroad. She'd have tried to get on some kind of terms with me. If I'd still been smashed up, she'd have wanted to have a look at her handiwork; if I'd completely recovered, she'd want to see whether she still had the power to cast a spell over me. And, if she felt she'd done me a great wrong, she'd have wanted to vindicate herself. Women drown bad consciences in self-justification. Will you go away?"
"I'll think about it. Jim, did you know that Babs took her religion so seriously?"
"No, but then I don't know her at all well."
"I'm taking all she says at face-value, allowing for a little natural rhetoric——"
"Well, I shouldn't—with any woman," Loring interrupted. "Look here, Jack. You and Babs have got yourselves into a tangle. You can get out of it by refusing to see her again—which you won't entertain; or by perjuring yourself—which I hope and pray you won't do; or by her climbing down a bit. One of you has to make the sacrifice; and I'm inclined to think Solomon would have said that, if she's not prepared to climb down—you're not asking her to do anything that the Church forbids—she's not in earnest, she's not worth having. Solomon would have said that, if she put you in the second place, she didn't want you.... I wonder whether she does. For all I know she's just made up her mind to add your scalp to her belt. Why the deuce did she let you propose to her—you did actually, didn't you?—if she meant to bring up this objection at the last minute?"
"It was only when I began to trot out the objections that she recognized them. Jim, this is a question of instinct; whether a woman's really in love with you or whether she's only pretending may be felt, but no one can prove it. I take it—though I've had no experience—that there's always a moment when a woman surrenders, not only in words but with all her being. If you'd ever broken in a horse, you'd know what I mean. It's like that with her."