couldn't see the good...."

"And I--I am to take it on trust," I said, bitterly.

"You couldn't see the good," she answered, "it isn't possible, and there
is no way of explaining. Our languages are different, and there's no
bridge--no bridge at all. We _can't_ meet...."

It was that revolted me. If there was no bridge and we could not meet,
we must even fight; that is, if I believed her version of herself. If I
did not, I was being played the fool with. I preferred to think that. If
she were only fooling me she remained attainable. If it was as she said,
there was no hope at all--not any.

"I don't believe you," I said, suddenly. I didn't want to believe her.
The thing was too abominable--too abominable for words, and incredible.
I struggled against it as one struggles against inevitable madness,
against the thought of it. It hung over me, stupefying, deadening. One
could only fight it with violence, crudely, in jerks, as one struggles
against the numbness of frost. It was like a pall, like descending
clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty
room--this belief in what she stood for, in what she said she stood for.

"I don't believe you," I proclaimed, "I won't.... You are playing the
fool with me ... trying to get round me ... to make me let you go on
with these--with these--It is abominable. Think of what it means for me,
what people are saying of me, and I am a decent man--You shall not. Do
you understand, you _shall_ not. It is unbearable ... and you ... you
try to fool me ... in order to keep me quiet ..."

"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."

She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly as she could touch it. I
remember it now, as one remembers these things. But then I passed it
over. I was too much moved myself to notice it more than subconsciously,
as one notices things past which one is whirled. And I was whirled past
these things, in an ungovernable fury at the remembrance of what I had
suffered, of what I had still to suffer. I was speaking with intense
rage, jerking out words, ideas, as floodwater jerks through a sluice
the _debris_ of once ordered fields.

"You are," I said, "you _are_--you--you--dragging an ancient name
through the dust--you ..."

I forget what I said. But I remember, "dragging an ancient name." It
struck me, at the time, by its forlornness, as part of an appeal to her.
It was so pathetically tiny a motive, so out of tone, that it stuck in
my mind. I only