set
my heart on you coming out to Spain, and when you wouldn't and I was
there and thought of the strain of a passionate love that seemed never
likely to come to anything vital, I gave up all of a sudden. I can't
explain. It was like that statue. I had to break it, and I broke my
heart in the same way."

"If you'd come back," said Jenny, determined he should know all his
folly, "I'd have done anything, anything you asked. I'd have come to
live with you forever."

"Oh, don't torture me with the irony of it all. Why were you so
uncertain, then?"

"That's my business," she said coolly.

"But I never really was out of love with you. I was always madly in
love," Maurice cried. "I traveled all over Europe, thinking I'd finished
with love. I tried to be happy without you and couldn't because I hadn't
got you. I adored you the first moment I saw you. I adore you now and
forever. Oh, believe me, my heart of hearts, my life, my soul, I love
you now more, more than ever."

"Only because I'm someone else's," said Jenny.

"No," he cried. "No! no! The passion and impetuousness and unrestraint
is all gone. I love you now--it sounds like cant--for yourself, for your
character, your invincible joyousness, your glory in life, your
perfection of form. Words! What are they? See how this fog destroys the
world, making it ghostly. My mere passion for you is gone like the
world. It's there, it must be there always, but your spirit, your
personality can destroy it in a moment. Oh, what a tangle of nonsense.
Forgive me. I want forgiveness, and once you said 'Bless you.' I want
that."

"I don't hate you now," Jenny said. "I did for a time. But not now. Now
you're nothing. You just aren't at all. I've got a boy who I love--such
a rogue, bless him--and what are you any more?"

"I deserve all this. But once you were sorry when I--when I----"

"Ah, once," she said. "Once _I_ was mad, too. I nearly died. I didn't
care for nothing, not for _any_thing. You was the first man that made me
feel things like love. You! And I gave you more than I'd ever given
anyone, even my mother. And you threw it all back in my face--because
you are a man, I suppose, and can't understand. And when I was mad to do
something that would change me from ever, ever being soppy again, from
ever loving anyone again, ever, ever, I went and gave myself to a
rotter--a real, dirty rotter. Just nothing but that--if you know what I
mean. And that was your fault. You started