Neither spoke for a while and then it began to dawn on them both that those two carelessly spoken sentences had much more to them than their face-value. They both had the uneasy sensation of being forced into a "situation."
"What for?" asked James at last.
"For good."
"But why?" he persisted, knowing perfectly well why, at bottom.
"You ought not to have to ask that," she replied. "You, of all people.—Why are you going away to-night?" she added, turning toward him with sudden passion.
James' first impulse was to make a sharp reply, his second was to get up and walk away, and then his glance fell upon her face.... Oh, was there no end to mortal misery?
"I'm sorry, Beatrice," he said wretchedly; "I'm sorry—I didn't mean to hurt you."
"Oh, it's all right," she answered in his own tone of voice. Then for a long time neither of them moved nor spoke.
The situation was on them now in full force, and it was a sufficiently terrific one, for actual life; one which under other circumstances they would both have made every effort to break up. Yet neither of them thought of struggling against it now—there was so much else to struggle against. Great misfortunes inoculate people to small embarrassments; no one in the throes of angina pectoris has much time to bother about a cold in the head. Then, as their silence wore on, they began to be conscious of a certain sense of companionship.
"I suppose it's pretty bad?" ventured James at last, on a note of tentative understanding.