“Yes.”

“I mean—­live with me without that.”

“Yes; without that.”

“It isn’t that I don’t care for you.  It’s because I care so awfully, so much more than anybody else could.  I want to go on caring, and it’s the only way.  People don’t know that.  They don’t know what they’re destroying with their blind rushing together.  All the delicate, exquisite sensations.  Charlotte, I can get all the ecstasy I want by just sitting here and looking at you, hearing your voice, touching you—­like this.”  His finger-tips brushed the bare skin of her arm.  “Even thinking of you ...

“...  And all that would go.  Everything would go....

“...  But our way—­nothing could end it.”

“I can see one thing that would end it.  If you found somebody you really cared about.”

“Oh that—­You mean if I—­It wouldn’t happen, and if it did, what difference would it make?”

“You mean you’d come back?”

“I mean I shouldn’t have left you.”

“Still, you’d have gone to her.  John, I don’t think I could bear it.”

“You wouldn’t have to bear it long.  It wouldn’t last.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Because—­You don’t understand, Charlotte—­if I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe her.”

“It wouldn’t, if you wanted her.”

“That would be worse.  I should hate her then if she made me go to her.”

“You don’t know.”

“Oh, don’t I!”

“You can’t, if you feel like that about it.”

“You say you feel like that about it yourself.”

“That’s because I’ve been through it.”

“Do you suppose,” he said, “I haven’t?”

BOOK TWO

JOHN RODEN CONWAY

VI

It was an hour since they had left Newhaven.

The boat went steadily, inflexibly, without agitation, cutting the small, crisp waves with a sound like the flowing of stiff silk.  For a moment, after the excited rushing and hooting of the ambulance car, there had been something not quite real about this motion, till suddenly you caught the rhythm, the immense throb and tremor of the engines.

Then she knew.

She was going out, with John and Gwinnie Denning and a man called Sutton, Dr. Sutton, to Belgium, to the War.  She wondered whether any of them really knew what it would be like when they got there.—­She was vague, herself.  She thought of the war mostly in two pictures:  one very distant, hanging in the air to her right, colourless as an illustration in the papers, grey figures tumbled in a grey field, white puff-bursts of shrapnel in a grey sky:  and one very near; long lines of stretchers, wounded men and dead men on stretchers, passing and passing before her.  She saw herself and John carrying a stretcher, John at the head and her at the foot and Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton with another stretcher.