Page:Dark Hester.djvu/119

‘No you don’t. I can’t believe it.’ He did not look at her. He walked beside her, his cigarette hanging at the edge of his lower lip, giving it a disdainful projection. ‘Why not face it? Why not own that life is an illusion? We get nothing that we hope to get. Or if we get it, we never keep it.’

‘Never?’ She, too, looked before her. Was this what he had seen in her face that afternoon at Norah’s?

‘Never. You know it as well as I do, since you are a brave woman. You often say it to yourself. No love lasts. That is what we want, of course. Not only to get it, but to keep it. It doesn’t last.’

‘No love?’

‘Not one. Haven’t you watched it in your own life? In other people’s? There may be a perfect time, a perfect relation; but hardly is it grasped and realized before it begins to change. It is swept away; or broken. Everything fades, Mrs. Wilmott. Everything.’

It was horrible to hear him riveting her chains upon her. His words seemed to knock great iron nails into her heart and, as she heard them, Charlie’s face flickered, remote, unsubstantial, to the tune of an old waltz of the nineties. And there went Clive, looking down at Hester, who held him