Her lips so quivered that when she first tried to speak no words would come. That she was truly ashamed brought no relief, no ease to her surrender, for she knew that it was her real self who had spoken thus incredibly. But she could at least disown that part of her.
“I beg your pardon, Michael,” she said. “I was atrocious. Will you forgive me? Because I am so miserable.”
He had nothing but love for her, love and its kinsman pity.
“Oh, my dear, fancy you asking that!” he said.
Just for the moment of their reconciliation, it seemed to both that they came closer to each other than they had ever been before, and the chance of the need of any such another reconciliation was impossible to the verge of laughableness, so that before five minutes were past he could make the smile break through her tears at the absurdity of the moment that now seemed quite unreal. Yet that which was at the root of their temporary antagonism was not removed by the reconciliation; at most they had succeeded in cutting off the poisonous shoot that had suddenly sprouted from it. The truth of this in the days that followed was horribly demonstrated.
It was not that they ever again came to the spoken bitterness of words, for the sharpness of them, once experienced, was shunned by each of them, but times without number they had to sheer off, and not approach the ground where these poisoned tendrils trailed. And in that sense of having to take care, to be watchful lest a chance word should bring the peril close to them, the atmosphere of complete ease and confidence, in which alone love can flourish, was tainted. Love was there, but its flowers could not expand, it could not grow in the midst of this bitter air. And what made the situation more and increasingly difficult was the fact that, next to their love for each other, the emotion that most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each knew that the other had seen them, and yet neither could mention them. For while Sylvia could not believe them, Michael could not help doing so, and thus there was no common ground on which they could speak of them. Often Mrs. Falbe, in whose blood, it would seem, no sense of race beat at all, would add to the embarrassment by childlike comments, saying at one time in reference to such things that she made a point of not believing all she saw in the newspapers, or at another ejaculating, “Well, the Germans do seem to have behaved very cruelly again!” But no emotion appeared to colour these speeches, while all the emotion of the world surged and bubbled behind the silence of the other two.