she were only fooling me she remained attainable. If it was as she said,
there was no hope at all--not any.

"I don't believe you," I said, suddenly. I didn't want to believe her.
The thing was too abominable--too abominable for words, and incredible.
I struggled against it as one struggles against inevitable madness,
against the thought of it. It hung over me, stupefying, deadening. One
could only fight it with violence, crudely, in jerks, as one struggles
against the numbness of frost. It was like a pall, like descending
clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty
room--this belief in what she stood for, in what she said she stood for.

"I don't believe you," I proclaimed, "I won't.... You are playing the
fool with me ... trying to get round me ... to make me let you go on
with these--with these--It is abominable. Think of what it means for me,
what people are saying of me, and I am a decent man--You shall not. Do
you understand, you _shall_ not. It is unbearable ... and you ... you
try to fool me ... in order to keep me quiet ..."

"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."

She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly as she could touch it. I
remember it now, as one remembers these things. But then I passed it
over. I was too much moved myself to notice it more than subconsciously,
as one notices things past which one is whirled. And I was whirled past
these things, in an ungovernable fury at the remembrance of what I had
suffered, of what I had still to suffer. I was speaking with intense
rage, jerking out words, ideas, as floodwater jerks through a sluice
the _débris_ of once ordered fields.