"Let me understand," she said. "You are originally in love with me; then you fall in love with Mildred; then you fall in love with me again. Is that it? We take turns. Were there others? You have gratified your whims; why may not I gratify my curiosity?"
Jack did not reply for a moment. Then, "I never fell in love with her," he said. "But a man is a man."
"And a woman only a woman," said Marie. "No, I ought not to have said that. That is not what we are here for. I want to know quite simply what you have got to say for yourself."
"This only. Six weeks ago--a short enough time, I grant--I should have come back to you, if you would have had me. You would not. If you had, I should have told you--past history myself. Would that not have made a difference?"
"You are a cold, passionless woman, and will not understand," he said. Then he paused a moment, for a long sigh lay suspended in her breast. "You object to my saying that?" he added.
"I should have told you. But you would not. And in an hour of moral weakness I fell. Ah, you do not know what such temptations mean!" he cried. "You have no right to judge."
Again Marie got up, and in a sudden restlessness began to pace up and down the room.
"I do know," she said. "I have felt it all. But this is the difference between me and certain others. You--you, I mean--Mildred, anybody, say, 'I desire something; and, after all, what does it matter?' Others and I say, 'It does not signify what I desire, and there is nothing in the world which matters more.' Oh, Jack, Jack!"--and for the second time she looked at him--"there is the vital and the eternal difference between us," she went on, speaking very slowly and weighing her words. "It is in this that there lies the one great incompatibility. If I were as you, if I could conceivably take the same view as you take, and think it possible that I should be able to be to another what Mildred has been to you, I would condone everything, because I should understand it. It would not matter then whether I had reached, as you have, the natural outcome of that possibility. If I could soberly imagine myself in that relation to another man than you, I would confess that there was no earthly reason why we should not continue to live comfortably together. But I cannot. I am not an adulteress. Therefore I will not, in act or in name, live with you any longer."
