"I will do all I can," he then said; "but, dear Camelia, dearest Camelia, I cannot marry her."
It was a strange echo. Camelia drew away from him.
"What can you _do_? She knows you are her friend; that only hurts."
"Does it?" He saw now, through the unconscious revelation, the greatness of her love for him, and saw that in the past he had not understood. She loved him so much that there was left her not a thought of self. Her whole nature was merged in the passionate wish that he should fulfil her highest ideal of him. He saw that she would have laid down her life for him--or for Mary, as she stood there, and, for Mary, she expected an equal willingness on his side.
"It would only be an agony to her," Camelia said; "she would fear every moment that she would betray herself to you, as she betrayed herself to me. Can't you see that? Understand that?" Desperately she reiterated: "You must pretend! You must lie! You must tell her that you love her! You must marry her, take her away to some beautiful country--there are places where they live for years; make a paradise about her. You _must_." She looked sternly at him.
"You mean that basest no?" She was trembling, holding herself erect as she confronted him; her white face, narrowly framed by the curves of loosened hair, tragic with its look of reprobation.
"I mean it. I will not. You will see that I am right. It would be a cruel folly, a dastardly kindness, a final insult from fate. And I do not think only of Mary--I think of myself; I could not lie like that."
Her silent woe and scorn, frozen now to a bleak despair, dwelt on him for a long moment, then, without another word, she turned from him and left him, making, by the majesty of her defeated wrong, his victorious right look ugly.
Camelia galloped home furiously. The tragedy was then to be consummated. He would not put out a finger to avert it. Mary would go down into the pit of nothingness, and her love, her agony, her strivings after good, would be as though they had never been.
"And _I_ live," thought Camelia, as she galloped, and her thoughts seemed to gallop beside her; they were like phantom shapes pressing on her from without, for she did not want to think. "_I_, thick-skinned, dull-souled I. Yes, materialism wins the day. Morality is a lie, evolved for the carpeting of lives like mine, for the preservation of the fittest!--_I_ being fittest! To those that have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away--the law of evolution. Oh! hideous, hideous! Oh, horror!--not even the ethical straw of development to grasp at; Mary's suffering has warped her, lowered her. She has been tortured into rebellion against her own sweet rectitude; she, who only asked to love--hates; she, who lived in a peaceful renunciation, now struggles, thinks only of herself."