"Of course it hasn't."
"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"
It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs.
Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that
there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady
mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it
was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a
difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the
nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison
between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that
serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an
invalid--neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in
order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not
women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing
the impossible?
His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk
about it, Molly. God knows what I feel."
This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of
deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.
He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the
reading. He sat and watched her.
Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.
Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated
its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it;
as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and
insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it
start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid
dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the
nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.
He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal
triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead--that was the horrible thing. Beneath
that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would
be young when he was long past middle age.
He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage
that had saved his life--for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate
actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine
ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have
left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable
"accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved
him all the better for it.