Beatrice turned away in despair, not angry at James, but realizing the inevitability of his reply as well as he himself. She sat down in an armchair and leaned her head against the back of it; she wished it might not be necessary ever to rise from that chair again. The blind hopelessness of their situation lay heavy on them both.
James spoke next.
"Beatrice, will you tell me what it's all about? Why are we squabbling this way? How can we find out—what on earth are we going to do about it all?"
"I've no more idea than you, James."
"Every time we get talking we always fall back on our bargain, as if that was the one reliable thing in the whole universe. Always our bargain, our bargain! Beatrice, what in Heaven's name is our bargain?"
"Marriage, I take it."
"You know it's more than that—less than that—not that, anyway! At first it was all quite clear to me; we were two people whose lives had been broken and we were going to try to mend them as best we might. And as it seemed we could do that better together than alone we determined to marry. Our marriage was to be a perfectly loose, free arrangement, and we were to stick to its terms only as long as we could profit by doing so. We were to part without ill feeling and with perfect understanding. And now, at the first shred of evidence—no, not even evidence, suspicion—that you want to break away we start quarreling like a pair of cats, and I become a monster of jealousy, like any comic husband in a play...."
Beatrice's heart sank again at those words; there was no mistaking the bitterness in them. That heightened a fear she had felt when James had answered her about the people on the yacht; James was still smarting with the discovery of his jealousy, and the trouble was that the smart was so sharp that he might not forgive her for having made him feel it. She felt the taste of her little triumph turn to ashes in her mouth.
"No, James, no!" she interrupted hurriedly. "You weren't, really. That was all nonsense—we both saw that...."
"No, it's true—I was jealous. Jealous! and for what? And what's more, I still am. I can't help it. When I think of Tommy, and the boat-race, and all that. Oh, Lord, the idiocy of it!"