“Because he felt your strength.  You’re very strong, Charlotte.  You gave him your strength.  And he could feel passion, mind you, though he couldn’t act it....  I suppose he could feel courage, too, only somehow he couldn’t make it work.  Have you got it clear?”

She nodded.  So clear that it seemed to her he was talking about a thing she had known once and had forgotten.  All the time she had known John’s secret.  She knew what would come next:  McClane’s voice saying, “Well then, think—­think,” and his excited gestures, bobbing forward suddenly from the hips.  He went on.

“The balance had to be righted somehow.  His whole life must have been a struggle to right it.  Unconscious, of course.  Instinctive.  His platonics were just a glorifying of his disability.  All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk....  So that his very lying was a sort of truth.  I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion.  He jumped at everything that helped him to get compensation, to get power.  He jumped at your feeling for him because it gave him power.  He jumped at the war because the thrill he got out of it gave him the sense of power.  He sucked manhood out of you.  He sucked it out of everything—­out of blood and wounds....  He’d have been faithful to you forever, Charlotte, if you hadn’t found him out. That upset all his delicate adjustments.  The war upset him.  I think the sight of blood and wounds whipped up the naked savage in him.”

“But—­no.  He was afraid of that.”

“He was afraid of himself.  Of what was in him.  That fear of his was his protection, like his fear of women.  The war broke it down.  Then he was cruel to you.”

“Yes.  He was cruel.”  Her voice sounded flat and hard, without feeling.  She had no feeling; she had exhausted all the emotions of her suffering.  And her knowledge of his cruelty was absolute.  To McClane’s assertion of the fact she had no response beyond that toneless acquiescence.

“Taking you into that shed—­”

He had roused her.

“How on earth did you know that?  I’ve never told a single soul.”

“It was known in the hospital.  One of the carpenters saw the whole thing.  He told one of our orderlies who told my chauffeur Gurney who told me.”

“It doesn’t matter what he did to me.  I can’t get over his not caring for the wounded.”

“He was jealous of them, because you cared for them.”

“Oh no.  He’d left off caring for me by then.”

“Had he?” He gave a little soft, wise laugh.  “What makes you think so?”

“That.  His cruelty.”

“Love can be very cruel.”

“Not as cruel as that,” she said.

“Yes.  As cruel as that....  Remember, it was at the bottom of the whole business.  Of his dreams.  In a sense, the real John Conway was the man who dreamed.”

“If you’re right he was the man who was cruel, too.  And it’s his cruelty I hate.”