"I may think more about that," said he.
But he didn't. He thought about the woman. His faith was shaken now, and his pride was harshly wounded. The devotion he had come to know was a madness and a martyrdom. Compared to it, all the things that men do with their boundaries, ambitions, conspiracies, and sundry national businesses, belonged to a lower dimension of life. He saw all his activities of the past as little and lesser movements. He could not have lived through them had he known how futile they were, how empty his heart was.
The great burden now was this meeting of the old world in her heart—her sending him away because they were man and woman alone. Man and woman, as he had thought, in the strangest and deepest moments of their lives. He loved the quest spirit in her eyes; he loved her capacity to sacrifice; he loved her mighty will for him to go and the cry of her most human heart for him to stay in the fright from the hyenas. He loved her now with this taint of the old upon her—that was the torturing truth. But he was disappointed.
He had been so far from the truck of convention, that he had neglected to speak of this point first. Had he spoken of it, he would have expected her to deny any cause for his changing from the Consulate to the Rest House in so far as a convention was concerned.... He felt himself in the old madness. These were the days of Hankow again, with all the added forces and energies of his life making hell for him. He was like an engine thrashing itself to pieces with its own power, because she had cut herself from him. He saw ahead a redder rending than he had known before, and which had brought him close to death.
He felt at rage with the world; capable even of telling Anna Erivan how vindictive was this hurt for a man who would die for her. But Romney unfrequently spoke in his rage. It came very seldom, and he had made it a law to laugh and speak of other things until it passed.
"Bamban," he said, "you Chinese men do not consider a woman."
"Ah, yes," said the wise little man.
"You do not consider the interests of the heart of man or woman comparable to the interests of one's country or business—"
"We keep them apart."
"That does not answer. If one's country or business demand the man, the woman must wait—"