"How could you? You're only a little girl. Annie Lipsett--that's her name. She's going to have a baby. I suppose I ought to marry her. Lots of fellows do get married like that. I can't afford it. I don't love her. That's what's so horrible. I don't love her, and I can't pretend that I do, I can't make myself believe that I do. I was so beastly miserable, that's what it was. Things go wrong, and they stay wrong, and then you want something and clutch at it and miss it. Miss it all the time. It wasn't just a beastly thing, I swear it wasn't. I was so miserable, that's what it was. I'm miserable now, and the worst of it all is that I'm enjoying it. That's the sort of brute I am."
Annette found that she was crying. Large tears welled out of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks into her mouth. The thing was closing in on her from all sides and suffocating her. Her imagination was baffled. She had thought herself bold, and suddenly she was out of her depth. She struck out blindly, and presently found a footing on the hard rock of conventional morality. From a suffering human being, craving sympathy, Annie Lipsett became a wicked woman to be condemned and shunned, a base creature who had enticed and enchained Frederic. Her footing on this rock was very insecure. Soon she was swept off it and flung hurtling down an empty sense of the treachery of her own emotions.
She muttered a reply. Frederic finished his supper and she removed his plate and the empty dish into the scullery. Frederic followed her, She trembled from head to foot, and longed only for him to leave her. He stood plucking at the roller-towel on the door, and he said:
"If any one did to you what I've done to her I should have to horsewhip him. Isn't it odd? I should think it simply absurd if anybody wanted to horsewhip me."
Annette had a sudden gust of rage and through her clenched teeth she threw at him:
"If you don't go away I'll smash a plate in your face."
"You are a queer one," he said. "But we're a queer family, and this is a queer house, isn't it?"
Annette rushed by him, all her nerves tingling and throbbing, and flew upstairs until she came to Serge's room. There she stood gasping, and presently broke out laughing and crying together. Serge gave her water and slapped her hands, and motioned to Basil Haslam to leave the room. Basil went and Annette clung to Serge and began to sob. Her laughter ceased, and when she had done crying Serge laid her on the bed and sat holding her hand for a long time, during which he forbade her to speak. Her head began to ache furiously, and every little sound in the house became explosive and a torment to her. Serge seemed to realise that too, and began to talk to her in a low, soothing voice. He described the bay at Cape Town as the ship heaves and throbs her way out of it with the little fringe of lights on the water's-edge under the mountain, and he told of long days at sea, the whole voyage home to England, the most beautiful country in the world. Something he gave her of what it had been to him to see green fields again and English skies and orchards and red poppies in the corn, and little, comfortable, cool English rivers.