'It isn't different; that's where you're wrong. You're just the same, and so am I. Except that I care for you far more than I ever did.'
'When I thought I was dying I showed your little photograph to Miss Clay. I told her all about it. I suppose I was rather mad. It was just after an operation. It doesn't matter a bit; she wouldn't ever say a word.'
'I had to confide in somebody,' he went on. 'I told her to send you back the photograph, and I told her that my greatest wish was to see you again.'
'Well, my dear boy, we have met again! Do change your mind from what you said last! I mean when you went away.' She spoke in an imploring tone.
She hesitated a moment, then said: 'Yes, I do.'
After a moment's pause he said: 'You say everything's changed. In a way it is. I look at things differently--I regard them differently. When you've been up against it, and seen life and death pretty close, you realise what utter rot it is to live so much for the world.'
Edith stared. 'But ... doesn't it make you feel all the more the importance of principle--goodness and religion, and all that sort of thing? I expected it would, with you.'
'Frankly, no; it doesn't. Now, let us look at the situation quietly.'
'As far as I make out, you're sacrificing yourself to Bruce. When he ran away with that girl, and begged you to divorce him, you could have done it. You cared for me. Everything would have been right, even before the world. No-one would have blamed you. Yet you wouldn't.'
'But that _wasn't_ for the world, Aylmer; you don't understand. It was for myself. Something in me, which I can't help. I felt Bruce needed me and would go wrong without me--'
'Why should you care? Did he consider you?'
'That isn't the point, dear boy. I felt as if he was my son, so to speak--a sort of feeling of responsibility.'
'Yes, quite. It was quixotic rubbish. That's my opinion. There!'
Edith said nothing, remembering he was still ill.
'Well,' he went on, 'now, he _hasn't_ run away from you. He's stayed with you for three years; utterly incapable of appreciating you, as I know he is, bothering you to death.'
'Don't I know him? You're wasting and frittering yourself away for nothing.'
'Don't you think I'd have looked after the children better than he?'
