He gazed around him quickly. There was no light save that which came from the hall. It was Marian’s bedroom.
He turned on her and seized her wrists, his heart beating violently. But his hostility rose, wave for wave, with his passion. What a trick to play on him! Deliberate! Deliberate!
But she stood there, close to him, perfectly still, looking up into his eyes. The corners of her mouth trembled a little.
“Good-bye, Stacey,” she murmured faintly, when he had released her. “Don’t think I was—trying to hold you. I wasn’t. I only wanted to say good-bye—like this. I think you’re—right—and I won’t hate you—any more than I can help. Good-bye!” And, with another swift glance up and down, she drew him back into the hall.
But when she was already half way to the library door she turned and came back a step or two. Her eyes were wet, but her mouth had curved into a mischievous smile.
Stacey managed to leave the house without seeing either Mr. or Mrs. Latimer. He walked away swiftly. And when the confusion of his senses wore off he began to see into things a little more deeply than before. He saw his feeling toward Marian as it really was and as, he perceived, Marian had understood it—animal desire and love of beauty. Desire was a bond. It hurt to have it go. Stacey felt a painful emptiness, as though he had torn something violently from his heart. Yet he also felt a kind of exultation.
Life in Vernon went on and on, and Stacey watched it proceed. But his attitude remained one of scornful indifference through which flickered occasional gleams of sudden eager interest, anger or hate. The perception of greed was one of the things that stirred him most frequently, and it grew within him until it amounted almost to a fixed idea. His hatred of money, its symbol, became fanatical. He would have renounced his own income entirely, except that he did not want to throw himself into the mêlée just yet, but somehow to see things through from outside—though through to where, he could not have said. As it was, he retained two hundred dollars a month and sent the rest to the relief fund for Viennese children. In this he was making no effort to live up to a principle, to conform himself to some ideal of life; if he had been, he would have sent all. He was, almost solely, striving for freedom from something he hated. Not quite solely, however, or why did he make this particular disposition of the money? He refused to answer the question. He would be free from what he loved as well as from what he hated.