. . .But it wasn’t nonsense. It was the truth,” he said doggedly. “It’s the important thing. You can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions. Still,” he added, as if arguing to himself, “if it weren’t as real a feeling as I’m capable of, I shouldn't be changing my life on your account.”
“What do you mean?” she inquired.
“I told you. I’m taking a cottage. I’m giving up my profession.”
“On my account?” she asked, in amazement.
“Yes, on your account,’ he replied. He explained his meaning no further.
“But I don’t know you or your circumstances,” she said at last, as he remained silent.
“You have no opinion about me one way or the other?”
“Yes, I suppose I have an opinion———” she hesitated. He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.
“I thought that you criticized me—perhaps disliked me. I thought of you as a person who judges———”
“No; I’m a person who feels,” he said, in a low voice.
“Tell me, then, what has made you do this,” she asked, after a break.
He told her in an orderly way, betokening careful preparation, all that he had meant to say at first; how he stood with regard to his brothers and sisters; what his mother had said, and his sister Joan had refrained from saying; exactly how many pounds stood in his name at the bank; what prospect his brother had of earning a livelihood in America; how much of their income went on rent, and other details known to him by heart. She listened to all this, so that she could have passed an examination in it by the time Waterloo Bridge was in sight; and yet she was no more listening to it than she
