It would be a great deception, and it's not the way I see my life, and
it would be misery if we don't understand."

He looked at her with eyes not lighted by her words. "If we don't
understand what?"

"That we're utterly different--that you're doing it all for _me_."

"And is that an objection to me--what I do for you?" he asked.

"You do too much. You're awfully good, you're generous, you're a dear,
oh yes--a dear. But that doesn't make me believe in it. I didn't at
bottom, from the first--that's why I made you wait, why I gave you your
freedom. Oh I've suspected you," Julia continued, "I had my ideas. It's
all right for you, but it won't do for me: I'm different altogether. Why
should it always be put upon me when I hate it? What have I done? I was
drenched with it before." These last words, as they broke forth, were
attended with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in
them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation, an old shame
almost--her late husband's flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his
indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the
humiliation of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a
new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same
spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same
concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with
the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution
to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that
hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery become simple. A personal
passion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing
that even a vain man--and Nick was not especially vain--might hesitate
to recognise the strength of); held in check at moments, with a strain
of the cord that he could still feel vibrate, by her deep, her rare
ambition, and arrested at the last only just in time to save her
calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these
calculations didn't make him think her cold or poor; there was in fact a
positive strange heat in them and they struck him rather as grand and
high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for
him--drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he wouldn't
after all serve her resolve to be associated, so far as a woman could,
with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an
uncertainty, the satisf