“Do!” she repeated after him vaguely. Then—“Must you?”
“But it isn’t possible,—no, it isn’t possible!” she cried.
“Quite possible,” he answered her doggedly. “I did not know you a month ago—I shall not know you a month hence, that’s all!”
She wailed out gently, like a child. “But what am I to do? What are you going to do?”
“I am going to do my work,” he answered her severely and coldly. “My work, that I have been letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and paint—like the very devil—as I did before you came. You must do that too. Work is the only thing, I find.”
“Work, work, honest work!” she repeated mechanically. “But will you tell me what work I have to do? It is all very well for you—you speak as if you quite looked forward to your life without me—but I shall eat my heart out.”
“Oh, people say that, but there is a certain savage pleasure in renunciation, as you will find.”
His tone was so extraordinarily bitter, that she cried out joyfully, “Oh, then you do care a little? You speak of renunciation! Then I can speak. I was afraid to. I was beginning to think—that you had only—oh, how difficult it is to say these things!—that you had only—proposed—to me, because I had compromised myself by staying here with you so long. Out of pity, you know!”
They had left the Broad Walk, and were wandering down a track in the undergrowth. He turned round to her, and his voice was quite different from the one he had been hitherto using.