"He was jealous of them, because you cared for them."
"Oh no. He'd left off caring for me by then."
"Had he?" He gave a little soft, wise laugh. "What makes you think so?"
"That. His cruelty."
"Love can be very cruel."
"Not as cruel as that," she said.
"Yes. As cruel as that.... Remember, it was at the bottom of the whole business. Of his dreams. In a sense, the real John Conway was the man who dreamed."
"If you're right he was the man who was cruel, too. And it's his cruelty I hate."
"Don't hate it. Don't hate it. I want you to understand his cruelty. It wasn't just savagery. It was something subtler. A supreme effort to get power. Remember, he couldn't help it. He had to right himself. Supposing his funk extinguished something in him that could only be revived through cruelty? You'll say he could help betraying you--"
"To you, too?"
"To me, too. When you lost faith in him you cut off his main source of power. You had to be discredited so that it shouldn't count. You mustn't imagine that he did anything on purpose. He was driven. It sounds horrible, but I want you to see it was just his way of saving his soul, the only way open to him. You mustn't think of it as a bad way. Or a good way. It wasn't even his way. It was the way of something bigger than he was, bigger than anything he could ever be. Bigger than badness or goodness."
"Did 'it' do cowardly things to 'save' itself?"
"No. If Conway could have played the man 'it' would have been satisfied. It was always urging him." ... "Try," he said, and she knew that now at any rate he was sincere; he really wanted to help her; he was giving her his best. His voice was very quiet now, his excited gestures had ceased. "Try and think of it as something more real, more important and necessary than he was; or you and I. Something that is always struggling to be, to go on being. Something that degeneracy is always trying to keep under.... Power. A power in retreat, fighting to get back its lost ground."
Then what she had loved was not John Conway. What she had hated was not he. He was this Something, tremendous and necessary, that escaped your judgment. You couldn't hurt it with your loving or hating or your ceasing to love and hate. Something that tortured you and betrayed you because that was the only way it knew to save itself.