, and mother ... I
promised you, I know, but it's not as if I ever said I loved you."

She should have spared him that! He had not put out a hand to hold her
that he should be so pierced through with needless cruelty. But she was
bent on clearing her skirts of him.

"Do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if I'd
cared in the least I'd have made it so easy for you? Can't you see that
it was all arranged, that we _jumped_ at you?" All the time she sat
opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her
appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark
flare of her hair. As if she felt how it belied at every turn the
quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him
feverishly. "I suppose you think I'm mercenary, and I thought I was,
too. You don't know how people like us _need_ money sometimes. All the
things we like _cost_ so--all the real things. And poor mamma, she
needed things; she'd never had them, and I thought that I could stand
being married to you if I could get them that way.... Maybe I could,
you know, if you'd been different, more like us I mean. But there was
such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about.
I found that out as soon as we were engaged. There wasn't a thing
between us; not a _thing_."

It poured scalding hot on Peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by
the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. He felt tears
starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "So
you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to
go on with it even"--she broke a little at this--"even if there hadn't
been anybody else. You see that, don't you?" She dared him to deny it
rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for
departure.

"I see that."

"You never really belonged to our set, you know----" She rose now and he
rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was
something still. "It hasn't been easy to go through with it.... Mother
isn't going to make it any easier. It's natural for her to want me to
have everything that money would mean, and I thought that if you would
just keep away from her ... you owe something to Burton and me for what
we've been through, I think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own
way...."

"I shall never trouble you, Eunice."

He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that