"I wish you to do nothing against your will. I thought you would have seen my point of view. I thought you would be ready to share in my work, which is the work of humanity.... I am sorry. You see, we clash. We shall be better alone."
He stared at her with dull incomprehension. "We clash. We shall be better alone." The words repeated themselves over and over again in his brain. And his mind suddenly went back to a little room in the Strand and the tears of Lilian....
"You mean that," he said, slowly. "You mean that."
She nodded. "Don't you see how impossible it would be?"
"You never loved me," he flung forth as a challenge. "You could have helped me and understood me.... I am not so bad as you think I am."
A sad smile answered him. "I understand you so well, Humphrey, that I know I shall never be able to help you."
He looked about him in weak hesitation. "I suppose I must begin again," he said.
"You ... you ... all the time it is you," she cried, passionately. "And what about myself; must not I begin over again, too?"
"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words. He longed intensely to be away from her now, to be out in the open street where he could think. This room was stifling. He went through the horrid methodical business of parting as if it were all a dream. He remembered glancing at the clock in a casual way, and saying, "I'd better be going"; he remembered the ludicrous search for one glove, he murmuring that it didn't really matter, and she insisting on a search with aching minuteness....
He never saw her again; her life had impinged on his, and left its impression, as many others had done. He did not regret her as he had regretted Lilian, for she had outraged his self-respect, and left him abashed and humbled.
He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.
At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages--making one cask into a dozen--so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs--but without bread to give to their children.