“What do you mean? why do you speak to me like ... like this, and then talk to me again about Leslie Dymock?”
He asked her whether she could not find her happiness with Leslie Dymock and realise in her life with him all the pictures whose colours he, Malory, had painted for her. And she answered so bitterly and so scornfully that he charged her with having her heart still fixed on Rawdon Westmacott.
“Still fixed!” she cried, emphasising the first word, “and how could that be still fixed which never was fixed at all?”
He was baffled; he thought her an unnatural creature to be still heart-whole when her youth, her advantages, and that depth which, in spite of her tameness, her reserve, and his own protestations of her lack of passion—protestations which I suspect he continued to make for the strengthening of his own unsure belief—he instinctively divined, should have created a tumult in her soul. It was to him unthinkable that such hammer-strokes as Nature, Westmacott, and Dymock had conjointly delivered on the walls of her heart, should have failed to open a breach. Such breaches, once opened, are hard to close against a determined invader. He urged her to confide in him, he told her that his whole delight lay in the problems of humanity, that metaphysics and psychology were to his mind as sea-air to his nostrils. She only looked at him, and I think it was probably fortunate for his vanity that he could not read what a fool she thought him. I suppose that every man must appear to a woman half a genius and half a fool. Much as a grown person must appear to the infinitely simpler and infinitely more complex mind of a child.
He urged her confidence, therefore, seeing that she remained silent, although her lips were still parted, her hand still lying on his hand, and the expectation still living in her eyes, that had not as yet remembered to follow the lead of her mind. They were the mirrors of her instinct, and her instinct was at variance with her reason. He had come down to the practical business of his mission, while she lived still in the enchanted moments of their flight into a realm to her unknown. If her ears received his emphatic words, her brain remained insensible to them. He detached his hand from hers, to lay it on her shoulder and to shake her slightly.
“Ruth, do you hear what I am saying to you?”
Her widened eyes contracted for an instant, as with pain, and turning them on him she prepared an expression of intelligent comprehension to greet his next sentence.
“I am asking you to trust me as a friend. It’s lonely to be left alone with a decision. If you are angry with me for interfering, tell me to go away, and I will go. But so long as I may talk to you, I want to keep my finger on the pulse of your affairs, where it has been, let me remind you, ever since I set foot in your father’s house. I want to see you happy in your home, and to know that I accompanied you at any rate to the threshold.”
She broke from him, he told me, with a cry; ran from him, and never reappeared that evening. On the following day she accepted Leslie Dymock.