“But if my love is strong enough . . .” and hesitated.

He heard something snap loudly in the fiery stillness.  She had broken her fan.  Two thin pieces of ivory fell, one after another, without a sound, on the thick carpet, and instinctively he stooped to pick them up.  While he groped at her feet it occurred to him that the woman there had in her hands an indispensable gift which nothing else on earth could give; and when he stood up he was penetrated by an irresistible belief in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach and passing away from him was the very secret of existence—­its certitude, immaterial and precious!  She moved to the door, and he followed at her elbow, casting about for a magic word that would make the enigma clear, that would compel the surrender of the gift.  And there is no such word!  The enigma is only made clear by sacrifice, and the gift of heaven is in the hands of every man.  But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas, and cares for no gifts but such as can be obtained in the street.  She was nearing the door.  He said hurriedly: 

“’Pon my word, I loved you—­I love you now.”

She stopped for an almost imperceptible moment to give him an indignant glance, and then moved on.  That feminine penetration—­so clever and so tainted by the eternal instinct of self-defence, so ready to see an obvious evil in everything it cannot understand—­filled her with bitter resentment against both the men who could offer to the spiritual and tragic strife of her feelings nothing but the coarseness of their abominable materialism.  In her anger against her own ineffectual self-deception she found hate enough for them both.  What did they want?  What more did this one want?  And as her husband faced her again, with his hand on the door-handle, she asked herself whether he was unpardonably stupid, or simply ignoble.

She said nervously, and very fast: 

“You are deceiving yourself.  You never loved me.  You wanted a wife—­some woman—­any woman that would think, speak, and behave in a certain way—­in a way you approved.  You loved yourself.”

“You won’t believe me?” he asked, slowly.

“If I had believed you loved me,” she began, passionately, then drew in a long breath; and during that pause he heard the steady beat of blood in his ears.  “If I had believed it . . .  I would never have come back,” she finished, recklessly.

He stood looking down as though he had not heard.  She waited.  After a moment he opened the door, and, on the landing, the sightless woman of marble appeared, draped to the chin, thrusting blindly at them a cluster of lights.