“A long time ago. It probably doesn’t tell them one thing.”
She gave him no response to his expressed surprise and he laughed and said, “D’you know, Rosalie, I don’t believe I’ve ever before heard you use slang.”
“One day last holidays when it was just on a year since I’d left Field’s. Just a year, you said, since I’d--chucked it. O Harry--”
There was a quality in her voice that might, from what she saw upon his face, have been a tocsin’s roll. His face was as a place of assembly into which, as it might be a people alarmed, there came crowding in emotions.
She said, “O Harry, you look out for yourself!”
There was much movement in his face. “Look out for myself?”
She said, “That came out of me. I didn’t know I was going to say it. It’s a warning. It shows the fear I have.”
“You’re going to say something you think will hurt me?”
“No, something you’ll have to fight--if you want to fight it. Harry, perhaps I can’t go on like this. I want to go back to my work.”
He expired a breath he had been holding. “I was guessing it.”
“No, while you’ve been speaking. Only now. I asked you weeks ago if you ever felt you regretted--”
She leant forward from the couch whereon she sat, and with an extended hand interrupted him. She said intensely, “Look here, Harry, if it was just regret I’d not mind and I would tell you No a hundred times, just not to disturb you, dear. But when you asked me that you spoke, a minute afterwards, of my having--chucked it, as if it was giving up sugar or stopping bridge. Well, that’s why I’m warning you to look out for yourself. Because, Harry, I don’t regret it. I’m craving to go back to it, craving, craving, craving!” She stopped. She said, “Do you want me not to go back, Harry?”
He looked steadily at her. “Rosalie, it would be a blow to me.”
She said, “Well, then!” and she leaned back in the couch as though all now was explained.
He very gravely asked her, “Are you going back, Rosalie?”
“Would it be a crime, Harry, to go back?”
He said to her, “I believe in my soul it would be a disaster.”
She got up. “Come over here to me, Harry.”
He went to her and took the hands that she extended to him. “If you think that, a disaster, and if to you it would be what you said, a blow; then that’s what I mean by saying, Harry, you look out for yourself. I don’t know if I’m going back. I want to go terribly, oh, terribly. There was a woman I once knew told me that if a woman once gives herself to a thing, abandons all else and gives herself to it, she never never can come back from it. ‘They don’t issue return tickets to women,’ she said to me. ‘If you give yourself,’ she said, ‘you’re its. You may think you can get away but you never will get away. You’re its.’ She was right, Harry. I believe I’ve got to go back. If you don’t want me to, well, you look out for yourself.” She drew herself towards him by her hands. “Harry, when I went down to Field’s with the children that day last holidays I took them to be a bodyguard to me, to prevent me from being captured. When they left me there alone for a few minutes, I turned away and wrung my hands because I knew I was going to be terribly tempted. I am terribly tempted. I’m being dragged.” She went into his arms. “Harry, hold me terribly tight and say you don’t want me to go back.”