definitely at an end. We-we talked-yesterday. We mean to end it

altogether." I clenched my hands. "She's-she's going to marry

Arnold Shoesmith."

I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of

her movement as she turned on me.

"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. "We're doing

nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right-as things

can be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing

things straight-now. Of course, you know… We shall-we

shall have to make sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely.

Very completely… We shall have not to see each other for a

time, you know. Perhaps not a long time. Two or three years. Or

write-or just any of that sort of thing ever-"

Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying

uncontrollably-as I have never cried since I was a little child. I

was amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was

on her knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping

with mine. "Oh, my Husband!" she cried, my poor Husband! Does it

hurt you so? I would do anything! Oh, the fool Iam! Dear, I love

you. I love you over and away and above all these jealous little

things!"

She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of

a son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. "Oh! my dear,"

she sobbed, "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you

cry. Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have

her, my dear, if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you,

dear. Oh! my Husband! My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!" For

a time she held me in silence.

"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two,

I mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you

together, so glad with each other… Oh! Husband mine, believe

me! believe me! I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise

how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my

life to you."…

"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.

"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we

should meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk

ourselves out. I still recall that day very well, recall even the

curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere

distinctive and memorable. We had seen so much of one another, had

become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with

a sense of incredible remoteness. We went together up over the

cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the

white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland. There,

in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a

spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water

remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came

presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls

and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and

swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually

disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.

We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our

relations. It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that

scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that

we did not at least touch upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I

have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem

between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to

solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way..

.. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves

until we were something representative and general. She was

womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.

"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."

"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.

"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have

turned back from America."

"I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."

I looked at her.

"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to

her life in saying it.

I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us

then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible

for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the

scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow

such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of

marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and

conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and

concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of

women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;

for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose

dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in