But you could have kept me,
Rachel, more than anyone I've ever known----"

She was not touched nor moved, only angered that he, so obviously in the
wrong, should attempt justification.

"Yes," she said hotly. "And I suppose in another moment you'll be
telling me that it's silly of me to be angry at what I saw this
afternoon?"

He thought it out a moment, then answered: "No, it was perfectly natural
of course--only I don't think you ought to mind much. If you really
cared, you wouldn't. It don't matter _really_ so much what I do if I
still like you best. Moments don't count--it's what goes on all the time
that matters. Why, I might kiss a hundred women and still you'd be the
only woman who mattered to me. I've never cared for one so long before,"
he added simply.

Then as she said nothing he went on: "I've never been sort of
educated--never cared enough for anyone to give things up. I would have
given things up for you if you'd wanted me to, but you didn't
really----"

"Aren't we a little off the point, Roddy?" she flung back. "The point is
how are we going to get along all the years and years we've got in front
of us? What are we going to do?"

"Everybody's just the same," said Roddy quietly. "It takes a lot of
years before married people settle down. We can't expect to be any
different----"

But although he spoke so quietly he watched her, hoping for some
yielding on her part; in an instant, had she come to him, she would have
seen a Roddy whom she had never seen before and from that moment onwards
would have had a power over him that nothing could have shaken.

So delicately hung the balance between them. But she was filled with a
sense of her own wrongs, her loneliness, the injustice of it all. At
that moment all affection for Roddy had left her, she would only have
been glad if she had known that she was never to see him again. His slow
voice, his way of thinking out his sentences, his thick clumsy hands and
his red face, everything came to her now as a continuation of the chains
that she had worn all her days.

She got up and confronted him--

"Yes," she said fiercely, "that's exactly it. Life is to be like
everyone else. We're to say the things, do the things that our
neighbours say and do. Because your friends at Brooks's kiss their
wives' friends, therefore you are to do so. Because the men you know
never say what they mean and lie about everything they do, therefore you
do the same. Oh! I know! H