there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so
exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn't it, to let
what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him
contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is
between you?"

She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his
reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring
susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short
cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but
now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of
her hypothesis.

"It's the difference that makes you care for me, then?" he broke out, with
a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.

"The difference?"

He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and he
drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent "Steady, boys," at which
their back-laid ears protested.

"It's because I'm moral and respectable, and all that, that you're fond of
me," he went on; "you're--you're simply in love with my virtues. You
couldn't imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say, with
Arthur?"

The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within
herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was coming:
her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.