“I sometimes think you’re not in love with me and never will be,” he said energetically.  She started and turned round at his words.

“I don’t satisfy you in the way you satisfy me,” he continued.  “There’s something I can’t get hold of in you.  You don’t want me as I want you—­you’re always wanting something else.”

He began pacing up and down the room.

“Perhaps I ask too much,” he went on.  “Perhaps it isn’t really possible to have what I want.  Men and women are too different.  You can’t understand—­you don’t understand—­”

He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.

It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly true, and that she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—­the sea, the sky.  She turned again the looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being.

“Or is it only this damnable engagement?” he continued.  “Let’s be married here, before we go back—­or is it too great a risk?  Are we sure we want to marry each other?”

They began pacing up and down the room, but although they came very near each other in their pacing, they took care not to touch each other.  The hopelessness of their position overcame them both.  They were impotent; they could never love each other sufficiently to overcome all these barriers, and they could never be satisfied with less.  Realising this with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and exclaimed: 

“Let’s break it off, then.”

The words did more to unite them than any amount of argument.  As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they clung together.  They knew that they could not separate; painful and terrible it might be, but they were joined for ever.  They lapsed into silence, and after a time crept together in silence.  Merely to be so close soothed them, and sitting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance.  They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness.  But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

Chapter XXIII

But no brush was able to efface completely the expression of happiness, so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them when they came downstairs as if they had spent the morning in a way that could be discussed naturally.  This being so, she joined in the world’s conspiracy to consider them for the time incapacitated from the business of life, struck by their intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and almost succeeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.