"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. My
marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you
here." She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me
my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to
go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all."
"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes
filling.
Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face
abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.
The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with
the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly
told him.
"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"
For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly
downward.
Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any
show of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her
bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the
hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the
occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept
his eye on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination
spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no
effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses
and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not
to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which
might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought,
that he should never again feel quite alone.
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they
were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their
separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world
apart.
"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless
_How on earth can I keep you?_ crying out to her beneath his words.