There was another long silence. Undine lay still, her eyes shut,
drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand. The other lay
cold in Ralph's clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the
benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking: the sense of
the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general
unnecessary disorganization of their lives.
"That's all you feel, then?" he asked at length a little bitterly, as if
to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too. He stood
up and moved away. "That's all?" he repeated.
"Why, what else do you expect me to feel? I feel horribly ill, if that's
what you want." He saw the sobs trembling up through her again.
"Poor dear--poor girl...I'm so sorry--so dreadfully sorry!"
The senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her. He knew it by the
quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water
before the coming of the wind. She turned about on him and jumped to her
feet.
"Sorry--you're sorry? YOU'RE sorry? Why, what earthly difference will it
make to YOU?" She drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from
her sides. "Look at me--see how I look--how I'm going to look! YOU
won't hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see
yourself in the glass! YOUR life's going on just as usual! But what's
mine going to be for months and months? And just as I'd been to all this
bother--fagging myself to death about all these things--" her tragic
gesture swept the disordered room--"just as I thought I was going home
to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little
pleasure after all our worries--" She dropped back on the sofa with
another burst of tears. "For all the good this rubbish will do me now! I
loathe the very sight of it!" she sobbed with her face in her hands.