She shook her head. "That you cannot do.... There is being drawn a line. Some men and women are on one side of it, and some men and women are on the other side of it. There is taking place a sorting-out.... In the things that make the difference you are where you were when Troy fell. I cannot go back, down all those slopes of Time."
"You wake in me no answering fire." She rose. "I will talk about much with you, but I will talk no longer about love. You may take your choice. Stay and talk as my old playmate and cousin, or say good-night and good-bye."
"If I go," said Ralph hoarsely, "I shall not come again--I shall not ask you again--"
"Ralph, Ralph! do you think I shall weep for that?... You do think that I shall weep for that!... You are mad!"
"By God!" said Ralph, and quivered, "I wish that we were together in a dark wood--I wish that you were in a captured city, and I was coming through the broken gate--" Suddenly he crossed the few feet between them, caught and crushed her in his arms, bruising her lips with his. "Just be a woman--you dark, rich thing with wings--"
Hagar had a physical strength for which he was unprepared. Exerting it, she freed herself, and in the same instant and as deliberately as swiftly, struck him across the face with her open hand. "Good-bye, to you!" she said in a thrilling voice.
They stared at each other for a moment across space. Then Hagar said quietly. "You had better go, Ralph...."
He went. When the door had closed behind him, she stood very still for a few moments, her eyes upon the pine bough. The excess of colour slowly ebbed from her face, the anger died in her eyes. "Oh, all of us poor, struggling souls!" she said. Obeying some inner impulse she first lowered, then extinguished the lights in the room and moved to one of the windows. She threw up the sash and the keen, autumnal night streamed in upon her. The window-seat was low and broad. She sat there with her head thrown back against the frame, and let the night and the high, starry heaven and the moving air absorb and lift her. It was very clear and there seemed depths on depths above. Hyades and Pleiades, and the Charioteer, and Andromeda Bound, and Perseus climbing the steep sky. "We are all bound and limited--we are all on the lower slopes of Time--down in the fens with the lower nature. It is only a question of more or less--Aspiration born and strengthening, or Aspiration yet in the womb. Then what room for anger because another is where I have been--because another, coming upward, rests awhile in the dungeon that was also mine, perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it was ages ago?... Where I am to-day will seem dungeon enough to that which one day I shall be.... And so with him, and so with us all...."