“Perhaps not so independent as you think! She’s only human, dear boy, even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she has with interiors. But I’m not pretending to understand Brenda. It’s only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you can’t bring yourself to be fonder of her.”
He responded nothing to that, and after a little she leaned forward and destroyed his trench, smoothing it out with her fingers. She was giving him her attention again, Doctor Steiner practically forgotten. She decided to speak gravely and simply.
“Hugh, dear! I’ve already lived. Had a life. My adorable children! They have satisfied the maternal in me. Filled my cup to overflowing. And I am deeply satisfied. I wouldn’t want more children, even if I married. That side of me is finished. Perfected. Do you see? Wouldn’t it be better for you—far better—if you could fall in love with a wholesome, healthy girl who still wants and needs all that for her development? I don’t say Brenda. I see she wouldn’t do. She’s not quite wonderful enough.... But some one quite wonderful.... If you could find her.... Don’t you think it would be kinder of me, even if I loved you, to give you up once and for all? Today! Now! For your sake?”
She was looking at the smoothed plateau where the trench had been between them. If Doctor Steiner had been there, actually in the body and not merely hovering in the background of Joan’s obsessed imagination, would he have noticed a contradiction between what Joan’s hands had just done in so ruthlessly destroying Hugh’s trench and the noble womanly kindness of Joan’s words? And supposing he had noticed the work of Joan’s hands, would he have called it the outward sign of an inward conflict; or would he—for even a psychoanalyst, no matter how bigoted, cannot be totally ignorant of human nature—have thought privately that here hypocrisy of a very simple order had accidentally symbolized itself? Perfectly self-conscious hypocrisy, at that?
She was looking at the smoothed plateau and not at Hugh, yet she felt that his dark gaze was raised, burningly, to her face. But she was wrong. Hugh was looking neither at her nor at the plateau her beautiful fingers were still smoothing and smoothing. He was looking into space. And he asked, with as grave a voice as she had used, and every bit as quietly, “Do you really and finally mean this, Joan? Are you telling me to give up hope of you? And would you be glad if I could find some one—wonderful—and she would be so simple and dear as to marry me, and we should have children? Do you mean this?”