"We came away from the tree too soon," Challis said. "Can't we turn?..."
"Suppose we do. We can go round the coppice.... What was I saying? Oh—about Society! Don't you think it is so? One has to reckon with one's Social Duties. So I'm told."
"We could have thought of Society before," Challis said, rather sullenly. And then he felt brutal. "No, Judith Arkroyd, I won't say that. Forgive me! All I mean is—it was all just as true—what you say about Society—six months ago as it is now. The mistake was then."
A small thing in his speech unnerved Judith—the way he used her full name. This was the second time he had done so. It seemed to imply some new aspect of their relation—the throwing aside of some veil—the recognition of some discarded formality. She was no longer "Miss Arkroyd"; and "Judith" would have been either patronage or impertinence. In her case there was no professional name to build a half-way house to familiarity on.
She dropped her worldly tone as misplaced or useless, as she said: "I had at one time half thought I would leave you to finish the play before I cried off. But should I have done you any service? I thought not, in the end, and I wished to get it over."
He said: "It is over now. No harm is done. I would not have had it otherwise."
She replied: "Your work will not be lost. You will think better of it—better about destroying it, I mean. You will finish it, I hope."
"No—I think I shall probably destroy it. I hate having incomplete manuscripts hanging about. They keep me always in doubt whether to go on with them or not."
"Then give this one the benefit of the doubt, and finish it. Come!" She tried to leggierire the tone of the conversation, but it was a failure—worse than a failure, by the speech that followed on its provocation.
"I can have no woman play the leading part but you. It was written for you, and I have kept you in my mind as I wrote. I...." And then Alfred Challis stopped dead. But his speech, had he let it all out of his heart, would have been: "I have kept you in my mind, and now you will not leave it. You have crept into its secret corners, and rise up between me and my duty at every turn. It is not for nothing that those eyes of yours have flashed through every syllable of my very commonplace blank verse, that that voice of yours has filled out my imagination of a dozen soliloquies complying with the highest canons of dramatic art, that that hand of yours has caressed undeserving tyrants and stabbed innocent persons on insufficient provocation!" It would have been all this, for he would not have been himself if he had kept back his constant sense of the ridiculous, a term in which his mind included himself as a prime factor. But he said never a word further than what we have reported. Only the last particle, "I," as good as contained all the rest.