"Like it! And I can't idle here any more. You can't expect me to hang on here any more--" "Oh, but I never _expected_--" she interrupted hastily, surprised and distressed that she should have produced any such impression. "Well, it comes to the same thing, your making difficulties about coming away, your wanting such a lot of persuading." He stopped in his quick pacing of the little room and stared at her. "Why, you're giving me _trouble_!" he said, in a voice of high astonishment. And as she stood looking at him with her lips fallen apart, her eyes full of a new and anxious questioning, he began to pace about again, across and round and up and down the unworthy little room. "God," he said, swiftly pacing, "how I do hate miss-ishness!" And indeed it seemed to him wholly, amazingly monstrous that his great new work should be being held up a day by any scruples of any sort whatever. "This grey headache of a sky," he said, jerking himself for a moment to the window, "this mud, this muggy chilliness--" "But--" she began. "The days here are lines--just length without breadth or thickness or any substance--" "But surely--till to-day--" "I feel in a sort of well in this place, out of sight of faith and kindliness--you shutting them out," he turned on her, "you deliberately shutting them out, putting the lid on the glory of light and life, being an extinguisher for the sake of nothing and nobody at all, just for the sake of a phantom of an idea about Robert--" "But surely--" she said. "I'm bored and bored here. This morning was a frightful thing. I daren't in this state even make a sketch of you. I'd spoil it. It'll rain for ever. I can't stay in this room. I'd begin to rave--" "But of course you can't stay in it. Of course you must go." "Go! When I can't work without you? When you're so everything to me that during the hours I'm away from you little things you've said and done float in my mind like little shining phosphorescent things in a dark cold sea, and I creep into warm little thoughts of you like some creature that shivers and gets back into its nest? I told you I was a parasite. I told you I depend on you. I told you you make me exist for myself. How can you let me beg? How can you let _me_ beg?" They stood facing each other in the middle of the room, his light eyes blazing down into hers. "You--you're sure I'd be back in ten days?" she said. And he had the presence of mind not to catch her to his heart. CHAPTER XXXI