as penetrated by an irresistible belief
in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach and passing away
from him was the very secret of existence--its certitude, immaterial and
precious! She moved to the door, and he followed at her elbow, casting
about for a magic word that would make the enigma clear, that would
compel the surrender of the gift. And there is no such word! The enigma
is only made clear by sacrifice, and the gift of heaven is in the hands
of every man. But they had lived in a world that abhors enigmas, and
cares for no gifts but such as can be obtained in the street. She was
nearing the door. He said hurriedly:

"'Pon my word, I loved you--I love you now."

She stopped for an almost imperceptible moment to give him an indignant
glance, and then moved on. That feminine penetration--so clever and
so tainted by the eternal instinct of self-defence, so ready to see an
obvious evil in everything it cannot understand--filled her with bitter
resentment against both the men who could offer to the spiritual and
tragic strife of her feelings nothing but the coarseness of their
abominable materialism. In her anger against her own ineffectual
self-deception she found hate enough for them both. What did they want?
What more did this one want? And as her husband faced her again,
with his hand on the door-handle, she asked herself whether he was
unpardonably stupid, or simply ignoble.

She said nervously, and very fast:

"You are deceiving yourself. You never loved me. You wanted a wife--some
woman--any woman that would think, speak, and behave in a certain
way--in a way you approved. You loved yourself."

"You won't believe me?" he asked, slowly.

"If I had believed you loved me," she began, passionately, then drew in
a long breath; and during that pause he heard the steady beat of blood
in his ears. "If I had believed it . . . I would never have come back,"
she finished, recklessly.

He stood looking down as though he had not heard. She waited. After a
moment he opened the door, and, on the landing, the sightless woman of
marble appeared, draped to the chin, thrusting blindly at them a cluster
of lights.

He seemed to have forgotten himself in a meditation so deep that on the
point of going out she stopped to look at him in surprise. While she
had been speaking he had wandered on the track of the enigma, out of the
world of senses into the region of feeling. What did it matter what she
had done, wha