Page:Encounters (Bowen).djvu/171

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THE SHADOWY THIRD


like that. She continued with his arm round her. "You never let me know the feel of wanting. Just the littlest differences in you would make me eat my heart out. I should never be able to ask you for things. I should just look and look at you, trying to speak, and then you would grow to hate me."

"—and then?"

"—Don't look at me like that, Martin, and then I should get ill, and if you didn't want me to come back I'd die. . . . Silly, I was only imagining. You shouldn't have made me talk."

"You shouldn't imagine things like that," he said sombrely. "What makes you do it? It's it's morbid: you might do yourself a great deal of harm. And besides, it's—it's———"

"Do things like that happen? Could a person go on loving and loving and never be wanted? "

"How should I know?"

"I think," she said, "that not to want a person must be a sort, a sort of murder. I think a person who was done out of their life like that would be brought back by the

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