sheer stupidity, who didn't know now how to remedy it. We belonged to each other immensely—immensely. The cab came to the little iron gate.
"Good-bye!" I said.
"Good-bye."
For a moment we held one another in each other's arms and kissed—incredibly without malice. We heard our little servant in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another. We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain. I tore myself from her.
"Go away," I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed me down.
I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cabman.
I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.
It was wide open, but she had disappeared. . . .
I wonder—I suppose she ran upstairs.
§10
So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform, a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of relief when at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest persuasion of irreparable error.
