“I shall not love you if you are so cruel. It is cruel to me to argue like this.”
“Perhaps it is. Yes, it is. I was carried away by my feeling for you. Heaven knows that I didn’t mean to; but I have loved you so that I have used you badly.”
“I don’t mind it, Harry!” she instantly answered, creeping up and nestling against him; “and I will not think at all that you used me harshly if you will forgive me, and not be vexed with me any more? I do wish I had been exactly as you thought I was, but I could not help it, you know. If I had only known you had been coming, what a nunnery I would have lived in to have been good enough for you!”
“Well, never mind,” said Knight; and he turned to go. He endeavoured to speak sportively as they went on. “Diogenes Laertius says that philosophers used voluntarily to deprive themselves of sight to be uninterrupted in their meditations. Men, becoming lovers, ought to do the same thing.”
“Why?—but never mind—I don’t want to know. Don’t speak laconically to me,” she said with deprecation.
“Why? Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their idol was second-hand.”
She looked down and sighed; and they passed out of the crumbling old place, and slowly crossed to the churchyard entrance. Knight was not himself, and he could not pretend to be. She had not told all.
He supported her lightly over the stile, and was practically as attentive as a lover could be. But there had passed away a glory, and the dream was not as it had been of yore. Perhaps Knight was not shaped by Nature for a marrying man. Perhaps his lifelong constraint towards women, which he had attributed to accident, was not chance after all, but the natural result of instinctive acts so minute as to be undiscernible even by himself. Or whether the rough dispelling of any bright illusion, however imaginative, depreciates the real and unexaggerated brightness which appertains to its basis, one cannot say. Certain it was that Knight’s disappointment at finding himself second or third in the field, at Elfride’s momentary equivoque, and at her reluctance to be candid, brought him to the verge of cynicism.
Chapter XXXIII
“O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery.”