Only then did Clytie clearly realise what she had been saying. The fit of supreme dejection passed off as suddenly as it had come, and she felt keenly the justice of his words.
“Oh, Kent, Kent, forgive me!” she cried, with starting tears. “I hardly knew what I was saying. You are so noble and true-hearted that you must forgive me. Sometimes when a woman is wretched she has not control over herself, and I am sometimes very, very wretched, Kent. I was thinking of myself more than of you when I said the thing that pained you. Tell me that you forgive me.”
The appeal was too human, too unreserved, to be rejected by Kent's tender nature. He sat down again by her and took her hand and kissed it gently.
“I have never seen you like this before,” he said. “I wish I could comfort you.”
He knew that it was no passing irritation or weariness that forced the confession from Clytie's proud nature. It was something deep and final—something impossible in her married life. Her wretchedness made him forget his own longing in the desire to be of use to her and lighten her lot. He let go her hand, which she allowed to lie on her lap as it fell, with the palms lightly upwards.
“I don't know why I have told you this to-day,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I have never breathed it or hinted it to a living being, and it came upon me unawares. Don't despise me, Kent.”
“Clytie!”
“Oh, yes. I know what any outsider would say. I was posing as the femme incomprise. I was casting away my womanly pride. Of all persons in the world you ought not to have been my confidant. Judged by conventional canons I am to be despised, for what can the world say of a woman who tells a man that still loves her that she regrets she did not marry him? Oh, don't interrupt me. I may as well speak out my true self once and for all to you. You yourself once remarked that if we were superior to conventionalities of habit, we ought to extend our unconventionalities to sentiment. You are loyal and staunch. You can help me by being my friend, for I have no one else to turn to. My life is a dreary mistake. My art does not satisfy me, because I have no hopes. One must have enthusiasms to be an artist, and all mine are dead. Now you know.”
There was a certain fierce pleasure in this self-abasement. It was like the vengeance of her higher nature upon her lower, the whip of scorn applied by the spirit to the flesh.
He did not answer, but looked at her with inexpressible sadness in his eyes. She added a few more words.