"No! no! no!" she cried almost violently, and he saw that she was trembling. "Some things don't grow again! It's not like plants, Mr. Oldmeadow. Some things are like living creatures; and they can die. They can die," she repeated, now walking rapidly away from him out into the large quadrangle with its grass plot cut across by the late sunshine. He followed her for a moment and he heard her say, as she went: "It's worse, far worse, not to mean to hurt. It's worse to care so little that you don't know when you are hurting."
"No, it's not," said Oldmeadow. "That's only being stupid; not cruel."
"It's not thinking that is cruel; it's not caring that is cruel," she repeated, passionately, half muttering the words, and whether with tears of fury he could not say.
He stood still at the doorway. "Good-bye, then," he said. And not looking behind her, as she went out swiftly into New College Lane, she answered, still on the same note of passionate protest: "Good-bye, Mr. Oldmeadow. Good-bye." He watched her small, dark figure hurry along in the shadow of the wall until the turning hid it from view.
Palgrave, apparently, had formed no conjectures as to their conversation and was thinking still of Adrienne's wrongs rather than of his own situation. "Did you take her home?" he said. "I see you're sorry for her, Roger. It's really too abominable, you know. I really can't say before her what I think, I really can't say before you what I think of Barney's treatment of her; because I know you agree with him."
Oldmeadow felt all the more able, shaken though he was by the interview below, to remember, because of it, what he thought. "If you mean that I don't consider Barney in the very least responsible for the death of the baby, I do agree with him," he said.
"Apart from that, apart from the baby," said Palgrave, controlling his temper, it was evident, in his wish to keep the ear of the impartial judge, "though what the loss of a child means to a woman like Adrienne I don't believe you can guess; apart from whose was the responsibility, he ought to have seen, towards the end, at all events, if he'd eyes in his head and a heart in his breast, that all she asked was to forgive him and take him back. She was proud, of course. What woman of her power and significance wouldn't have been? She couldn't be the first to move. But Barney must have seen that her heart was breaking."