nd years and
years--unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything
that is worth having between us in order just to get me."

"But I want _you_, Mary," I cried, drumming at the little green table
with my fist. "I want you. I want nothing else in all the world unless
it has to do with you."

"You've got me--as much as anyone will ever have me. You'll always have
me. Always I will write to you, talk to you, watch you. Why are you so
greedy, Stephen? Why are you so ignoble? If I were to come now and marry
you, it wouldn't help you. It would turn you into--a wife-keeper, into
the sort of uninteresting preoccupied man one sees running after and
gloating over the woman he's bought--at the price of his money and his
dignity--and everything.... It's not proper for a man to live so for a
woman and her children. It's dwarfish. It's enslaving. It's--it's
indecent. Stephen! I'd hate you so." ...

Sec. 7

We parted at last at a cab-rank near a bridge over the Canal at the
western end of Park Village. I remember that I made a last appeal to her
as we walked towards it, and that we loitered on the bridge, careless of
who might see us there, in a final conflict of our wills. "Before it is
too late, Mary, dear," I said.

She shook her head, her white lips pressed together.

"But after the things that have happened. That night--the moonlight!"

"It's not fair," she said, "for you to talk of that. It isn't fair."

"But Mary. This is parting. This indeed is parting."

She answered never a word.

"Then at least talk to me again for one time more."

"Afterwards," she said. "Afterwards I will talk to you. Don't make
things too hard for me, Stephen."

"If I could I would make this impossible. It's--it's hateful."

She turned to the kerb, and for a second or so we stood there without
speaking. Then I beckoned to a hansom.

She told me Beatrice Normandy's address.

I helped her into the cab. "Good-bye," I said with a weak affectation
of an everyday separation, and I turned to the cabman with her
instructions.

Then again we looked at one another. The cabman waited. "All right,
sir?" he asked.

"Go ahead!" I said, and lifted my hat to the little white face within.

I watched the cab until it vanished round the curve of the road. Then I
turned about to a world that had become very large and empty and
meaningless.

Sec. 8

I struggled feebly to arrest the course of events. I wrote Mary some
violent and