No! But it was just because our relationship was so
infernally irregular that you felt those separations--took them, if I may
say it, so hard. Depend upon it, that was it."
Her lip curled back, though she said nothing. She wondered if he had
always been quite so fatuous as this, quite so sublimely unhumorous. If he
had, what under heaven had she been about? That she could have believed
this smug cockscomb to have loved her--to have been capable of anything
but hunger and thirst for her--incredible! It made her out precisely as
fatuous as he. And yet she said nothing. With the likes of him nothing
seemed worth doing except to forget him.
And she was to marry him, to live in his house, to see him daily--ah, and
more than that; and yet she said nothing of what her curled back lip
expressed. She was in the presence of her fate, and, as ever, was dumb
before it. To make him shrivel under scorn, to wind her tongue about him
like a whip till he writhed; to play the honest woman and tell him quietly
that she did not love and had nothing more to say to him; or to ask him
urgently for release--she did none of these things: none of them entered
her head. She had never shirked the apportioning of the Weaving Women.
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