“I cannot say who he is,” said Ann Veronica, “but he is a married man....  No!  I do not even know that he cares for me.  It is no good going into that.  Only I just want him.  I just want him, and no one else will do.  It is no good arguing about a thing like that.”

“But you thought you could forget him.”

“I suppose I must have thought so.  I didn’t understand.  Now I do.”

“By God!” said Manning, making the most of the word, “I suppose it’s fate.  Fate!  You are so frank so splendid!

“I’m taking this calmly now,” he said, almost as if he apologized, “because I’m a little stunned.”

Then he asked, “Tell me! has this man, has he dared to make love to you?”

Ann Veronica had a vicious moment.  “I wish he had,” she said.

“But—­”

The long inconsecutive conversation by that time was getting on her nerves.  “When one wants a thing more than anything else in the world,” she said with outrageous frankness, “one naturally wishes one had it.”

She shocked him by that.  She shattered the edifice he was building up of himself as a devoted lover, waiting only his chance to win her from a hopeless and consuming passion.

“Mr. Manning,” she said, “I warned you not to idealize me.  Men ought not to idealize any woman.  We aren’t worth it.  We’ve done nothing to deserve it.  And it hampers us.  You don’t know the thoughts we have; the things we can do and say.  You are a sisterless man; you have never heard the ordinary talk that goes on at a girls’ boarding-school.”

“Oh! but you are splendid and open and fearless!  As if I couldn’t allow!  What are all these little things?  Nothing!  Nothing!  You can’t sully yourself.  You can’t!  I tell you frankly you may break off your engagement to me—­I shall hold myself still engaged to you, yours just the same.  As for this infatuation—­it’s like some obsession, some magic thing laid upon you.  It’s not you—­not a bit.  It’s a thing that’s happened to you.  It is like some accident.  I don’t care.  In a sense I don’t care.  It makes no difference....  All the same, I wish I had that fellow by the throat!  Just the virile, unregenerate man in me wishes that....

“I suppose I should let go if I had.

“You know,” he went on, “this doesn’t seem to me to end anything.

“I’m rather a persistent person.  I’m the sort of dog, if you turn it out of the room it lies down on the mat at the door.  I’m not a lovesick boy.  I’m a man, and I know what I mean.  It’s a tremendous blow, of course—­but it doesn’t kill me.  And the situation it makes!—­the situation!”

Thus Manning, egotistical, inconsecutive, unreal.  And Ann Veronica walked beside him, trying in vain to soften her heart to him by the thought of how she had ill-used him, and all the time, as her feet and mind grew weary together, rejoicing more and more that at the cost of this one interminable walk she escaped the prospect of—­what was it?—­“Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights” in his company.  Whatever happened she need never return to that possibility.