Irene uncovered her lips, and both her hands made a writhing gesture in front of her breast.  Soames seized them.

“Don’t!” she said under her breath.  But he stood holding on to them, trying to stare into her eyes which did not waver.  Then she said quietly: 

“I am alone here.  You won’t behave again as you once behaved.”

Dropping her hands as though they had been hot irons, he turned away.  Was it possible that there could be such relentless unforgiveness!  Could that one act of violent possession be still alive within her?  Did it bar him thus utterly?  And doggedly he said, without looking up: 

“I am not going till you’ve answered me.  I am offering what few men would bring themselves to offer, I want a—­a reasonable answer.”

And almost with surprise he heard her say: 

“You can’t have a reasonable answer.  Reason has nothing to do with it.  You can only have the brutal truth:  I would rather die.”

Soames stared at her.

“Oh!” he said.  And there intervened in him a sort of paralysis of speech and movement, the kind of quivering which comes when a man has received a deadly insult, and does not yet know how he is going to take it, or rather what it is going to do with him.

“Oh!” he said again, “as bad as that?  Indeed!  You would rather die.  That’s pretty!”

“I am sorry.  You wanted me to answer.  I can’t help the truth, can I?”

At that queer spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to actuality.  He snapped the brooch back into its case and put it in his pocket.

“The truth!” he said; “there’s no such thing with women.  It’s nerves-nerves.”

He heard the whisper: 

“Yes; nerves don’t lie.  Haven’t you discovered that?” He was silent, obsessed by the thought:  ‘I will hate this woman.  I will hate her.’  That was the trouble!  If only he could!  He shot a glance at her who stood unmoving against the wall with her head up and her hands clasped, for all the world as if she were going to be shot.  And he said quickly: 

“I don’t believe a word of it.  You have a lover.  If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be such a—­such a little idiot.”  He was conscious, before the expression in her eyes, that he had uttered something of a non-sequitur, and dropped back too abruptly into the verbal freedom of his connubial days.  He turned away to the door.  But he could not go out.  Something within him—­that most deep and secret Forsyte quality, the impossibility of letting go, the impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his own tenacity—­prevented him.  He turned about again, and there stood, with his back against the door, as hers was against the wall opposite, quite unconscious of anything ridiculous in this separation by the whole width of the room.

“Do you ever think of anybody but yourself?” he said.

Irene’s lips quivered; then she answered slowly: