“After all, I loved you. . . .”

“I did not know,” she whispered.

“Good God!” he cried.  “Why do you imagine I married you?”

The indelicacy of his obtuseness angered her.

“Ah—­why?” she said through her teeth.

He appeared overcome with horror, and watched her lips intently as though in fear.

“I imagined many things,” she said, slowly, and paused.  He watched, holding his breath.  At last she went on musingly, as if thinking aloud, “I tried to understand.  I tried honestly. . . .  Why? . . .  To do the usual thing—­I suppose. . . .  To please yourself.”

He walked away smartly, and when he came back, close to her, he had a flushed face.

“You seemed pretty well pleased, too—­at the time,” he hissed, with scathing fury.  “I needn’t ask whether you loved me.”

“I know now I was perfectly incapable of such a thing,” she said, calmly, “If I had, perhaps you would not have married me.”

“It’s very clear I would not have done it if I had known you—­as I know you now.”

He seemed to see himself proposing to her—­ages ago.  They were strolling up the slope of a lawn.  Groups of people were scattered in sunshine.  The shadows of leafy boughs lay still on the short grass.  The coloured sunshades far off, passing between trees, resembled deliberate and brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter.  Men smiling amiably, or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their black coats, stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer toilettes, recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated flowers smile at bewitched knights.  There was a sumptuous serenity in it all, a thin, vibrating excitement, the perfect security, as of an invincible ignorance, that evoked within him a transcendent belief in felicity as the lot of all mankind, a recklessly picturesque desire to get promptly something for himself only, out of that splendour unmarred by any shadow of a thought.  The girl walked by his side across an open space; no one was near, and suddenly he stood still, as if inspired, and spoke.  He remembered looking at her pure eyes, at her candid brow; he remembered glancing about quickly to see if they were being observed, and thinking that nothing could go wrong in a world of so much charm, purity, and distinction.  He was proud of it.  He was one of its makers, of its possessors, of its guardians, of its extollers.  He wanted to grasp it solidly, to get as much gratification as he could out of it; and in view of its incomparable quality, of its unstained atmosphere, of its nearness to the heaven of its choice, this gust of brutal desire seemed the most noble of aspirations.  In a second he lived again through all these moments, and then all the pathos of his failure presented itself to him with such vividness that there was a suspicion of tears in his tone when he said almost unthinkingly, “My God!  I did love you!”