"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can't see. You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."
"Everything. It's your way all through. You love me because what you see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I am now. I am the same woman I was then."
"The very same. You have not changed at all."
She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit baseness of his earlier attitude as a man to her as a woman, a woman who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said, the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him forever to the sensual and the seen.
Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.
"Maurice, it isn't entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."
"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then----"
"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then--whatever it is that you love now."
"Seen? Seen? That's it. There was nothing to see."
Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his anger he could not understand.
"Why are you always reminding me of what I was five years ago? I _have_ changed. Can't a man change if you give him five years to do it in?"
"Time? It's an eternity. If I was a brute to you, do you suppose the consciousness of my brutality isn't a far worse punishment than anything I could have made you feel?"
She raised her eyebrows. "What? Have you been suffering all this time--this eternity?"
"Yes. That is, I'm suffering enough now."
"Then perhaps you have some idea of what you made me feel."
"It's the first time I've reproached you with it, even in my thoughts."
He looked at her with unbelieving eyes. And yet he knew that it was true. Her sweetness, her lucidity, had been proof against the supreme provocation. She had forgiven, if she had not forgotten, the insult that no woman remembers and forgives.
As his eyes wandered the hand that had lain so lightly on his arm gripped it to command his attention, and he trembled through all his being. But she no longer shrank from him; she kept her hold, she tightened it, insisting.