"And then one has to put up with them," he said.
"You'll find you're not as good at 'putting up' as you imagine," she said.
He went on working rapidly at his design.
"Do you ever ask HER opinion?" she said at length.
"What of?"
"Of you, and the whole thing."
"I don't care what her opinion of me is. She's fearfully in love with me, but it's not very deep."
"But quite as deep as your feeling for her."
He looked up at his mother curiously.
"Yes," he said. "You know, mother, I think there must be something the matter with me, that I CAN'T love. When she's there, as a rule, I DO love her. Sometimes, when I see her just as THE WOMAN, I love her, mother; but then, when she talks and criticises, I often don't listen to her."
"Yet she's as much sense as Miriam."
"Perhaps; and I love her better than Miriam. But WHY don't they hold me?"
The last question was almost a lamentation. His mother turned away her face, sat looking across the room, very quiet, grave, with something of renunciation.
"But you wouldn't want to marry Clara?" she said.
"No; at first perhaps I would. But why--why don't I want to marry her or anybody? I feel sometimes as if I wronged my women, mother."
"How wronged them, my son?"
"I don't know."
He went on painting rather despairingly; he had touched the quick of the trouble.
"And as for wanting to marry," said his mother, "there's plenty of time yet."
"But no, mother. I even love Clara, and I did Miriam; but to GIVE myself to them in marriage I couldn't. I couldn't belong to them. They seem to want ME, and I can't ever give it them."
"You haven't met the right woman."
"And I never shall meet the right woman while you live," he said.
She was very quiet. Now she began to feel again tired, as if she were done.
"We'll see, my son," she answered.
The feeling that things were going in a circle made him mad.
Clara was, indeed, passionately in love with him, and he with her, as far as passion went. In the daytime he forgot her a good deal. She was working in the same building, but he was not aware of it. He was busy, and her existence was of no matter to him. But all the time she was in her Spiral room she had a sense that he was upstairs, a physical sense of his person in the same building. Every second she expected him to come through the door, and when he came it was a shock to her. But he was often short and offhand with her. He gave her his directions in an official manner, keeping her at bay. With what wits she had left she listened to him. She dared not misunderstand or fail to remember, but it was a cruelty to her. She wanted to touch his chest. She knew exactly how his breast was shapen under the waistcoat, and she wanted to touch it. It maddened her to hear his mechanical voice giving orders about the work. She wanted to break through the sham of it, smash the trivial coating of business which covered him with hardness, get at the man again; but she was afraid, and before she could feel one touch of his warmth he was gone, and she ached again.