He was
suddenly annoyed. Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance.
He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to
necessity. His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low,
insistent voice. She made no reply, but remained supported in the
doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.
"You must change your mind," he asserted; "you can't be eternally so
foolish. There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield."
"I don't want you to, really," she admitted in an agonized whisper. "I
shall never again ask you to do that. Ah, God, how low I am."
He saw, in an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She
would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to
peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen,
possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She
turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted
countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her
in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged white of her dress, her bare
throat and arms, her cheeks wet with tears. Out of it her eyes, wide
with pain, steadily met his angry scrutiny. Out of it she smiled at him
before the reflection died.
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