body I was offering you? ... And I've lost my love. And I've
failed, and I shall never be any more good here. I swore I would see a
certain thing through, and I haven't seen it through, and I can't! But
I've told you all this before.... What's left? Even my unhappiness
is leaving me. Unless I kill myself I shall cease to exist. Don't you
understand? Yes, you do."

After a marked pause she added:

"And I may overtake Queen."

"There's one thing I don't understand," he said, "as we're being
frank with each other. Why do you tell me? Has it occurred to you that
you're really making me a party to this scheme of yours?"

He spoke with a perfectly benevolent detachment deriving from hers.
And as he spoke he thought of a man whom he had once known and who had
committed suicide, and of all that he had read about suicides and what
he had thought of them. Suicides had been incomprehensible to him, and
either despicable or pitiable. And he said to himself: "Here is one
of them! (Or is it an illusion?) But she has made all my notions of
suicide seem ridiculous."

She answered his spoken question with vivacity: "Why do I tell you? I
don't know. That's the point I've been arguing to myself all night
and all day. _I'm_ not telling you. Something _in_ me is forcing me to
tell you. Perhaps it's much more important that you should comprehend
me than that you should be spared the passing worry that I'm causing
you by showing you the inside of my head. You're the only friend I
have left. I knew you before I knew Carly. I practically committed
suicide from my particular world at the beginning of the war. I was
going back to my particular world--you remember, G.J., in that little
furnished flat--I was going back to it, but you wouldn't let me. It
was you who definitely cut me off from my past. I might have been
gadding about safely with Sarah Churcher and her lot at this very
hour, but you would have it otherwise, and so I finished up with
neurasthenia. You commanded and I obeyed."

"Well," he said, ignoring all her utterance except the last words,
"obey me again."

"What do you want me to do?" she demanded wistfully and yet defiantly.
Her features were tending to disappear in the tide of night, but she
happened to sit up and lean forward and bring them a little closer to
him. "You've no right to stop me from doing what I want to do. What
right have you to stop me? Besides, you can't stop me. Nothing can
stop me. It is settled. Ever