I fell on my knees beside her. Each of the low half-whispered words was a red hot iron. I had received last night the message of her white face with incredulity. I had reviewed our past life together and had found little warrant in it for that message. It could not come from the depths. It was staggeringly impossible. And now the impossible was the flaming fact. I fell on my knees beside her. “Not play, Judith--” She put out her hand to check me, and the words died on my lips. What could I say? “For you it was a detached pleasant sentiment, if you like; for me the deadliest earnest. I was a fool too. You never said you loved me, but I thought you did. You were not as other men, you knew nothing of the ways of the world or of women or of passion--you were reserved, intellectual--you viewed things in a queer light of your own. I felt that the touch of a chain would fret you. I gave you absolute freedom--often when I craved for you. I made no demands. I assented to your philosophic analysis of the situation--it is your way to moralise whimsically on everything, as if you were a disconnected intelligence outside the universe--and I paid no attention to it. I used to laugh at you--oh, not unkindly, but lovingly, happily, victoriously. Oh, yes, I was a fool--what woman in love isn’t? I thought I gave you all you needed. I was content, secure. I magnified every little demonstration. When you touched my ear it was more to me than the embrace of another man might have been. I have lived on one kiss of yours for a week. To you the kiss was of no more value than a cigarette. I wish,” she added in a whisper, “I wish I were dead!” She had spoken in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one has broken a woman’s heart. “You never knew I loved you?” she went on in the same bitter undertone. “What kind of woman did you take me for? I have accepted help from you to enable me to live in this flat--do you imagine I could have done such a thing without loving you? I should have thought it was obvious in a thousand ways.” The fire getting low, she took up the scoop for coals. Mechanically I relieved her of the thing and fulfilled the familiar task. Neither spoke for a long time. She remained there and I went to the window. It had begun to rain. A barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and every vibrant note was like a hammer on one’s nerves. The grinder’s bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm. She had a black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and she grinned like a happy child of nature. Men in my position do not blacken women’s eyes; but it is only a question of manners. Was I, for that, less of a brute male than the scowling beast at the organ?