“But there was more than that. Life has always been rough for me. Rough from the beginning when my father used to whip me, rough at school, rough when I starved in London, roughest of all when young Stephen died. I'd wanted to make something out of it and I suppose the easiest way seemed to me to make it romantic. This place, you know, was always in my bones. That Tower down in the Market Place, old Tan's curiosity shop, the sea--these were the things that kept me going. Afterwards in London it was the same. Things were hard so I made them into a story--I coloured them up. Nothing hurt when everything was romance. I made Clare romance too--that was the way, you see, that all my life was bound up so closely together. She was an adventure just as everything else had been. And she didn't like it. She couldn't understand the Adventure point of view. It was, to her, immoral, indecent. I went easily along and then, one day, all the romance went out of it--clean--like a pricked bubble. When young Stephen died I suddenly saw that life was real--naked--ugly, not romantic a bit. Then it all fell to pieces like a house of cards. It's easy enough to be brave when you're attacking a cardboard castle--it's when you're up against iron that your courage is wanted. It failed me. I've funked it. I'm going to run away.” He could see that Norah Monogue's whole life was in the vigour with which she opposed him-- “No, no, no. To give it up now. Why, you're only thirty--everything's in front of you. Listen. I know you took Clare crookedly, I saw it in the beginning. In the first place you loved her, but you loved her wrong. You've been a boy, Peter, all the time, and you've always loved like a boy. Don't you know that there's nothing drives a woman who loves a man more to desperation than that that man should give her a boy's love? She'd rather he hated her. Clare could have been dealt with. To begin with she loved you--all the time. Oh! yes, I'm as certain of it as I can be of anything. I know her so well. But the unhappiness, the discomfort--all the things, the ugly things, that her mother was emphasising to her all the time--frightened her. Knowing nothing about life she just felt that things as they were were as bad as things could be. It seems extraordinary that any one so timid as she should dare to take so dangerous a plunge as running off to another man.