would be but half-realised," she returned with no drop in her ardour.
"No, I don't want to think of you as feeling a great pain, I don't want
even to think of you as making a great sacrifice. I want to think of
you--"

"As a stupid brute who has never existed, who never CAN exist!" he broke
in. "A creature who could know you without loving you, who could leave
you without for ever missing you!"

She turned impatiently away and walked to the other end of the terrace.
When she came back he saw that her impatience had grown sharp and almost
hard. She stood before him again, looking at him from head to foot and
without consideration now; so that as the effect of it he felt his
assurance finally quite sink. This then she took from him, withholding
in consequence something she had meant to say. She moved off afresh,
walked to the other end of the terrace and stood there with her face to
the garden. She assumed that he understood her, and slowly, slowly, half
as the fruit of this mute pressure, he let everything go but the rage of
a purpose somehow still to please her. She was giving him a chance to do
gallantly what it seemed unworthy of both of them he should do meanly.
She must have "liked" him indeed, as she said, to wish so to spare him,
to go to the trouble of conceiving an ideal of conduct for him. With
this sense of her tenderness still in her dreadful consistency, his
spirit rose with a new flight and suddenly felt itself breathe clearer
air. Her profession ceased to seem a mere bribe to his eagerness; it was
charged with eagerness itself; it was a present reward and would somehow
last. He moved rapidly toward her as with the sense of a gage that he
might sublimely yet immediately enjoy.

They were separated by two thirds of the length of the terrace, and he