down the nearly empty kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary’s words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such curiously substantial shape in his mind.
“I doubt that one human being ever understands another,” he said, stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few feet.
“Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about love, and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You think I’ve behaved very badly,” he continued, as she did not speak. “Of course I behave badly; but you can’t judge people by what they do. You can’t go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule. That’s what you’re always doing, Mary; that’s what you’re doing now.”
She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the charge, although it did not affect her main position.
“I'm not angry with you,” she said slowly. “I will go on seeing you, as I said I would.”
It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was difficult for him to say what more it was that
