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a childish faith, a reverent worship, and the kindness and
tenderness of a grown man — all the love that filled a man’s
life — that flared up on the border of old age. And it should
have been given to a woman who could love him in return, who
could live with him for those few years the life he had dreamt
of, longed and hoped for, would last — live with him so that
she would be bound to him by a thousand happy memories
when old age came, having been in true love the wife of his
youth and manhood, and ageing with him.
But she — what could she give him if she remained? She had
never been able to give him anything, only taken what he gave.
If she tried to stay, she would not be able to make him believe
that all her longing for life was quenched for ever in the love
of their youth. He would himself tell her to go. She had
loved and given; she did not love any more, and would be free.
That is how he would look upon it; he would never understand
that she mourned because there was nothing — nothing she had
been able to give.
She could not bear to hear him speak about her gifts to him.
It is true that she had brought him her pure soul when she gave
herself to him. He could never forget it, and he measured, as
it were, the depth and strength of her love by this fact, for she
had given him the purity of her youth — of twenty years.
She had kept it as a white bridal dress, unused, unstained,
and in her longing and anxiety lest she should never come to
wear it, in despair over her cold solitude and her inability to
love, she had clung to it, crumpled it, and soiled it with her
thoughts. Was not any one who had lived the life of love
purer than she, who had been brooding and spying and longing
until all her faculties were paralysed by that longing?
She had given herself — and yet what a slight impression it
had made on her. She was not altogether cold; sometimes she
was carried away by his passion, but she feigned passion while
she was cool, and when she was away from him she scarcely
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