THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
time with all her mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you—that's just what I mustn't do. The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be———" And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give—there you are; stick to me as close as you like, and see if I don't. Only I can't listen or receive or accept—I can't agree. I can't make a bargain. I can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
He let her question fall—though clearly, it might have seemed, because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that was spoiled. "You want some body of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
She was to wonder afterwards if she had not been, at this juncture, on the point of saying something emphatic and vulgar—"Well, I don't at all events want you!" What somehow happened, however, the pity of it being greater than the irritation—the sadness, to her vivid sense, of his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was nothing to nourish him—was that his error amounted to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of usefulness
177
