“I haven’t. But when you arranged with yourself to take me in like that, you couldn’t have been thinking very kindly of me. I can’t understand how you carried it through, when I was so easy, and all the circumstances were so easy.”
Her crouching position by the fire became threatening. Fred got up, and Thea also rose.
“No,” he said, “I can’t make you see that now. Some time later, perhaps, you will understand better. For one thing, I honestly could not imagine that words, names, meant so much to you.” Fred was talking with the desperation of a man who has put himself in the wrong and who yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct. “Suppose that you had married your brakeman and lived with him year after year, caring for him even less than you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems—sickening!” He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the hearth for her.
“Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea.” He began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down compliantly. “Don’t you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learn the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. Everything is second-hand with them. Why, you couldn’t live like that.”
Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed, her chin level, her head set as if she were enduring something. Her hands, very white, lay passive on her dark gown. From the window corner Fred looked at them and at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through which muffled cries and calls and the clang of car bells came up from the street. He turned again and began to pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.
“Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that sort of person. You will never sit alone with a pacifier and a novel. You won’t subsist on what the old ladies have put into the bottle for you. You will always break through into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi found out about you; that you couldn’t be kept on the outside. If you’d lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with the discreet brakeman, you’d have had just the same nature. Your children would have been the realities then, probably. If they’d been commonplace, you’d have killed them with driving. You’d have managed some way to live twenty times as much as the people around you.”
Fred paused. He sought along the shadowy ceiling and heavy mouldings for words. When he began again, his voice was lower, and at first he spoke with less conviction, though again it grew on him. “Now I knew all this—oh, knew it better than I can ever make you understand! You’ve been running a handicap. You had no time to lose. I wanted you to have what you need and to get on fast—get through with me, if need be; I counted on that. You’ve no time to sit round and analyze your conduct or your feelings. Other women give their whole lives to it. They’ve nothing else to do. Helping a man to get his divorce is a career for them; just the sort of intellectual exercise they like.”
Fred dived fiercely into his pockets as if he would rip them out and scatter their contents to the winds. Stopping before her, he took a deep breath and went on again, this time slowly. “All that sort of thing is foreign to you. You’d be nowhere at it. You haven’t that kind of mind. The grammatical niceties of conduct are dark to you. You’re simple—and poetic.” Fred’s voice seemed to be wandering about in the thickening dusk. “You won’t play much. You won’t, perhaps, love many times.” He paused. “And you did love me, you know. Your railroad friend would have understood me. I could have thrown you back. The reverse was there,—it stared me in the face,—but I couldn’t pull it. I let you drive ahead.” He threw out his hands. What Thea noticed, oddly enough, was the flash of the firelight on his cuff link. He turned again. “And you’ll always drive ahead,” he muttered. “It’s your way.”
There was a long silence. Fred had dropped into a chair. He seemed, after such an explosion, not to have a word left in him. Thea put her hand to the back of her neck and pressed it, as if the muscles there were aching.
“Well,” she said at last, “I at least overlook more in you than I do in myself. I am always excusing you to myself. I don’t do much else.”