Your hands were
wet, d'you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of
bread, and then you said, 'Human Beings!'"
"And I thought you--a prig," she recollected. "No; that's not quite it.
There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John
were like those ants--very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your
virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you--"
"You fell in love with me," he corrected her. "You were in love with me
all the time, only you didn't know it."
"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.
"Rachel--what a lie--didn't you sit here looking at my window--didn't
you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun--?"
"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love is what
people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies and I tell the
truth. Oh, what lies--what lies!"
She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr.
Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It
was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they
used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon
her engagement.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever
feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they
were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service
had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they
didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and
arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single
spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had
not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way;
he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he
wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps.
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